Visit to Ghent University Library

On Friday I travelled to Ghent from Milan and was most fortunate to be invited as a fly on the wall to the Google International Press Conference at Ghent for their book scanning project. You know what they say about best laid plans.....the flight was late and so was the train to Ghent so I arrived just as they wrapped up the press conference but was able to take part of the tour for media.


After the media left I was fortunate enough to spend most of the afternoon with Inge Van Nieuwerburgh who is the coordinator of the Digital Library (and leads the in house digitisation program).

Ghent Library in summary: The heritage collection is one of the most important in Belgium after the Royal Library.


The collection is housed the the Book Tower which is classified as a monument. It is undergoing major restoration including building an underground repository - the uniqueness of the collection means there is limited access to the physical objects. It also houses a reading room as the collection is closed and because of the uniqueness much of it has very limited access.

In 2007 there was a serious flood - damaged 20,000 books



The Library has centralised core functions and there is usually a library per faculty (11 faculties spread over the town) - Political and social sciences has a purely virtual Library.


Central library has approx 2million volumes, 5,ooo serials, 4,000 newspapers, 136 papyri, 6,500 manuscripts, 700 incuabula, 10,000 early paintings 40,000 letter, 117 private archives, 60,000 photographs, 1 million ephemera items , 8 metres death notices, 18,000 auction catalogues + many other items. 16,000 volumes are from the period 1500 - 1599.


The Library started a electronic catalogue in 1984 and have scanned it 2.6 million cards from its card catalogue in 2004 and are OCR'd and searchable


Google Books project is focused on all out of copyright books in the Library and makes them available online. It commenced in 2007 all will scan all books published to 1869. Size, condition and value all play a part in selection (no manuscripts digitised). The investment from the Library is doing some basic description, retrieving books and preparing for shipment and in return the Library receives a digital copy of the book in three formats TIFF (per page) and PDF. Staff are not informed of the location of the digitisation centre they ship books to or the process which is used. It takes on an average turn around a month from sending to receiving books back. .



After the project 300,000 volumes will be available through google book search. Currently 91,814 volumes have been scanned 60% of which full text is available via google book search. It is estimated it will take 3-5 years to scan all books


The project has raised the profile of the Library (and the collections) and staff have noted a significant increase of enquires from research as a result.



In house Digitisation projects
Mainly project funded or in partnership with faculties and a staff of two undertake most of the digitisation. On demand digitisation take much of their resources..



Workflow is: Selection - restoration (low level inc cleaning) - pre cataloguing (minimal description) - scan - temp storage (to ensure it meet minimum requirements/criteria ie ID, metadata etc) - repository(then online).


Equipment - large flat bed, A2 bookeye and flexible digital camera set up which is use for much of the digitisation. Camera sources from America and bench from Zertchel (they did not consider the Zertchel option as it was too "fixed" for their needs)

Interesting Fact

SFX was developed by a member of the Library staff and sold for a realativly small fee to ExLibris.