Abstract: The traditional library history is institution oriented. The cultural turn of the humanities brings new themes into the focus of historical research. Culture is seen as a heterogeneous open and dynamic ‘polysystem’ and as a repertoire of action. The ‘reception’ of the book is seen as a constructive activity. Libraries are of special value for cultural research: they host the most extensive and little known collections of documents for the history of the human mind. Libraries should provide in addition to the bibliographic description copy specific description, provenance and collection information for the reconstruction of libraries. So they can contribute to main fields of historical anthropological research like memory, cultural transfer, cultural monuments or gender studies. International cooperation is needed to alleviate the access to the almost limitless stores of research sources.