A significant part of the collection of the Boekentoren Library is also online available for consultation and research. E-journals and e-books are an essential part of the scientific collection. On a daily base, heritage collections are scanned in the scan departement of the Library and made available in digital form. The large scale digitisation project of Google Books resulted in about 250.000 old prints (older than 1880) of the University Library that can be consulted now worldwide. The content of thousands of audiovisual carriers (VHS, lacquer discs, 16mm film...) and newspapers got a new live after digitisation in collaboration with meemoo. Increasingly, digital born collections and archives find their way to the tower.
The library collections are searchable via lib.ugent.be where you can consult documents online, request a scan or have items set aside for collection.
Many books and magazines have been published (only) digitally for decades. Some 500,000 e-book titles are available via the lib.ugent.be catalogue. The University Library subscribes to numerous major scientific journals, resulting in more than 150,000 unique journal titles in the lib.ugent.be catalogue. Browse Ghent University Library's online selection of journals via BrowZine.
Every day, Boekentoren staff get down to work in the scanning studio. Because not all volumes of academic journals are available online, UGent students and staff can have articles digitised on request. In addition, high-quality scans of other works housed in the Boekentoren can also be requested.
Since 2007, Google has digitised more than 250,000 books older than 1870 from the collection of the Boekentoren. As one of the largest libraries in Belgium, Ghent University Library was the first Belgian library to join the Google Books project. We followed in the footsteps of Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University... Through the cooperation, books in Dutch, French, German, Latin, etc. have been added to the programme that includes both popular classics and rare and special collections that could previously only be consulted in the library itself.
To make Ghent University Library's extensive collection available online for research, the library has received assistance from various partners. Since 2014, meemoo, the Flemish Institute for Archives, has been digitising some 6,000 audiovisual carriers from the collection. These include ¼ inch audiotapes, VHS cassettes, lacquer plates, wax rolls and film celluloid. Additionally, 16,000 newspapers dating from the First World War were given a digital life by meemoo in 'News from the Great War'.
The University Library has been receiving more and more born-digital archives and collections of professors, artists and Ghent residents. The diverse material is currently stored on hard disks and/or computers. The Boekentoren is working on ways to make this material accessible for further research.
Questions regarding collections at the Boekentoren? In need of a digital reproduction? Want to borrow specific collection items for an exhibition? Contact us!
The University Library provides UGent editors with a platform for publishing open access journals.
The academic bibliography and institutional archive of UGent are a collection of research publications by UGent researchers.