The Saxon State Library - Dresden State and University Library (SLUB), created in 1996 from the merger of the Saxon State Library (SLB) and the library of the Dresden University of Technology (TUD), has an "ancestral gallery". It includes portraits of the head librarians, as the heads of the Electoral and later Royal Library were known until 1896, and directors from two centuries. As far as can still be traced, they came to the library through donation, purchase or as commissioned works. The same applies to the portraits of a number of meritorious employees and one female employee, some of whom were esteemed as book scholars beyond Dresden.

As varied as the artistic value of the artworks is, so different are the characters depicted and sometimes labelled with attributes that point to biographical and professional aspects. Some of the pictures were displayed in publicly accessible areas, others in individual offices. They reminded the librarians in office of the personal qualities and the librarianship and academic achievements of their predecessors and reminded them of their duty to maintain and continuously develop the library, which had been open to the public since 1788. Combining the management of the library with their own academic work was a balancing act for many of those portrayed throughout their lives. The tense relationship between librarianship and academic work, which still characterises the discourse on the profession today, is reflected in the exhibition. However, the presentation also shows which fields of activity were tackled that are still present in the SLUB today or are being transferred into the digital age.

The portraits make this clear: People make libraries by creating, collecting, organising, recording, preserving, providing, communicating and using media - analogue in the past, increasingly digital today.