University library

Facilitating open knowledge creation

The mission of Ghent University Library is to provide a foundation that focuses on:

• Sustainability
• Literacy
• User-driven approach
• Web services

Each faculty library and the Boekentoren library provides its own services under the same regulations with minimum requirements in terms of opening hours, staffing and public services offered. The Boekentoren takes on the role of both a preservation library and digital library.

Collections

The Boekentoren manages more than 65 km of collections - not only books and journals but also an extensive heritage collection. Around one million collection items have been digitised.

Online library

Digitised collection pieces are available online. Together with the faculty libraries, the Boekentoren manages a large digital collection containing more than 300,000 e-books and thousands of subscriptions to online journals.

The University Library also manages the Academic Bibliography - a database that is available online with over 300,000 publications by UGent researchers.

Open science

The Boekentoren team is committed to the longterm vision of more open science. With its scholarly publishing staff, data stewards and curators, the library supports the institutional open access and Research Data Management (RDM) policy. Central to this is facilitating sustainable access to research publications and data.