With more than 700.000 items, the BBF is today Europe's second largest library specialised in education. Like the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, it belongs to the association of German cultural research libraries fulfilling a national role.

Nine Libraries belong to the Library Network at the World Bank Group and IMF Headquarters location in Washington D.C. References to materials owned by all the Libraries are available through JOLIS, the online catalog.

LIVIVO bundles scientifically relevant resources from the subjects fields medicine, health, nutrition, environmental and agricultural sciences. It provides a common search interface over various data sources, such as library catalogs, specialist bibliographic databases, full texts from journals, and quality-controlled web content. LIVIVO combines the former ZB MED search portals MEDPILOT (2003 to 2015) and GREENPILOT (2009 to 2015).