New content uploaded on eluxemburgensia.lu “Bulletin de la Société des naturalistes luxembourgeois” and “Hémecht”

The National Library invites users to discover new content on the eluxemburgensia.lu portal. Recent editions of the Bulletin de la Société des naturalistes luxembourgeois as well as those of the history journal Hémecht are now available online free of charge.

These new editions expand the collection of the Bulletin de la Société des naturalistes luxembourgeois and the journal Hémecht, which were already digitised and made available online in 2015 and 2020 respectively.

While the older publications 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 as their historical counterparts.

Concerning the journal Hémecht, the issues 2/2021 to 4/2022 are only accessible online on BnL premises. You may wonder why that is the case. Even though one of the National Library’s missions is to make its collections available to as many people as possible, it must act in accordance with copyright law. This is especially relevant for recent, born-digital publications, for which an agreement must be reached with publishers, authors and content creators before they are made fully accessible.

Other publications will soon go through the same process and will be made available online after evaluation of their technical characteristics and copyright situation.