Acquisition of the library of Professor Dietrich Braun

The Iron Library has succeeded in acquiring a large collection of books and journals on the subject of plastics. This was part of the private library of Professor Dietrich Braun, who headed the German Plastics Institute (DKI) in Darmstadt for many years and was one of the leading figures in plastics research in the second half of the 20th century. The former DKI now constitutes the Plastics Division of the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability. The Braun Collection is yet another important building block in the development of the new plastics collection focus. Florian Ruhland, Academic Librarian at the Iron Library, traveled to Darmstadt to view the collection at the DKI's former premises and supervised the packing of 45 moving boxes for transport to the Iron Library. We'd like to thank Steve Kunzelmann from GF Piping Systems for his support in organizing the transport.

Prof. Dr. Dietrich Braun was born in 1930 and studied chemistry in Leipzig and Mainz, where he wrote his doctorate in 1957 under Werner Kern, a student of Hermann Staudinger. He also completed his Habilitation in Mainz in 1960. From 1969 to 1999 Braun was the Director of the German Plastics Institute (DKI) in Darmstadt and from 1977 to 1999 he was also Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Darmstadt Technical University. – Dietrich Braun was editor of the new edition of the Kunststoff-Handbuch (Handbook of Plastics), of the journals Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics and Applied Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics and authored numerous standard works on the chemistry and the history of plastics.