Polish Literary Bibliography (PBL)

The Polish Literary Bibliography (PBL) (in Polish: Polska Bibliografia Literacka) is a service and database providing access to data on literary, theatrical and film culture for 1989-2003. It documents books published in Poland in Polish and other languages as well as books published abroad in Polish and other languages when they pertain to Polish writers or when their author is Polish.

The service is curated by the PBL team — the Department of Current Bibliography of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Pracownia Bibliografii Bieżącej Instytutu Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk). The department has operated in Poznań since 1948. The „Polish Literary Bibliography” publishing series has been printed since 1954, with 45 annuals published by 2000, containing materials for the years 1944/45–1988. The printed volumes of the PBL have been digitalized and they are available in the public repository. 2001 was a breakthrough year for the presentation of the materials from the „Polish Literary Bibliography” as it saw the launch of the online PBL database, available at www.pbl.ibl.poznan.pl and spanning the years 1989–2003.

For every year the PBL team examines approx. 850 periodicals: nation-wide dailies; domestic literary, cultural, and cultural-social periodicals; series published by scholarly institutions; selected émigré press titles; and foreign scholarly journals devoted to the subject matter of Slavic countries. A significant percentage of these records are also annotated. An important aspect of the PBL tradition is that it is a bibliography of not only texts, but also theater, film, radio, and television works (when connected with literature or theater) and also that it keeps indexes of people, institutions, works, series, and periodicals.