307 recent issues of the d’Lëtzebuerger Land uploaded by the BnL New content on eluxemburgensia.lu

The National Library invites users to discover 307 recent issues of the Luxembourgish weekly d’Lëtzebuerger Land, from 2017 to 2022, which can be viewed free of charge on eluxemburgensia.lu.

These new issues expand the collection already made available online in 2013. The latter covered issues from 1954 to 2007. While the older issues of Land are retroactively digitised by the BnL, the more recent ones are collected in their digital form and uploaded to eluxemburgensia.lu. While these are two different processes, they do complement each other. This allows the BnL to be as comprehensive as possible, even if this process is more laborious.

For more than two decades, the BnL has been digitising its magazines, newspapers and historical works in-house. With the emergence of desktop publishing (DTP), publishers already hold digital files of each of their publications. Thus, the step of digitising printed resources is gradually disappearing as the BnL can collect the initial files from the publishers and make them available on its portals.

However, what seems to be quick and easy is not. While for mass digitisation projects, the standards and formats of the files to be produced are defined beforehand, when it comes to born-digital publications, the BnL must rely on the help and collaboration of publishers to receive adequate files. A second challenge is to find and manage the different IT tools that allow users to access these resources. Moreover, given their heterogeneity, the BnL cannot provide these files with the same functionalities (e.g. tables of contents or image captions) as their historical counterparts. The BnL is working to improve and enhance these functionalities in the future, in particular through artificial intelligence projects.

As regards the weekly newspaper d’Lëtzebuerger Land, the public can access the years 1954 to 2007 and the issues from January 2017 to December 2022. The BnL does not have the digital files for issues from 2008 to 2016, so they have yet to be retroactively digitised. They will form part of one of the BnL’s planned mass digitisation campaigns.