The “Polish Literary Bibliography” (“Polska Bibliografia Literacka”, PBL) contains information about literature, theater, and film. 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) — has operated in Poznań since 1948. The creator and the first Director of the PBL authors’ team was Professor Stefan Vrtel-Wierczyński.

The “Polish Literary Bibliography” 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.

Records of non-literary books on literature are, whenever possible, made by the bibliographer “with the book in the hand” (from autopsy).

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.

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 Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes. For more information about the collection click on the PBL 1944–1988 tab.

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.

The grant project which resulted in the new PBL website came to an end in 2018.

The PBL monograph has been published in the electronic form since 2013. It is available in the Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes and it encompasses the records made during a given calendar year by the PBL editorial staff. The PBL is prepared by the PBL Department of Current Bibliography team.