The Consortium department of the National Library of Luxembourg is managing a number of digital libraries on behalf of consortial groupings as well as individual organisations, at varying service levels. Centralised expertise and shared tools are part of the National Library’s infrastructure missions to ensure cost-effective public service. IT hard- and software are managed by the National Library’s IT department in close cooperation with the Luxembourg State computing center (CTIE).
History, 2002 until today
In 2002, the National Library launched a self-developed digital library offer, which can still be found at the archive.org service, who luckily made a copy of the original as it appeared back then.
In 2005, the National Library launched a dedicated digital library portal at the address findit.lu, based on MetaLib by Exlibris. The main innovation in 2005 was that access was not limited anymore to the library building but availbale from anywhere with a free National Library card. This initiative was warranted in 2006 when the newly established University of Luxembourg joined to use this portal for its users. Joint financing of licences allowed the offer to expand significantly. This fledgling consortial structure was formalised in 2009 as the “Consortium Luxembourg pour l’acquisition et la gestion de publications électroniques”, when the public research centers Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST, merger of CRP Henri Tudor and CRP Gabriel Lippmann) and Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH, formerly CRP Santé) joined. The MetaLib platform “findit.lu” was finally turned off in 2020.
Since 2014, the new delivery platform for all consortial content is at a-z.lu, the National Library’s search engine based on the ExLibris Primo discovery solution. Integrated services include a cloud-based index of several 100 million references, a fully responsive interface and the integration of more than 80 catalogues of the bibnet.lu library network.
In 2014, the Consortium members decided on a multi-annual project to reassess its infrastructure, diversify services and improve statistics and tools to ensure that digital library services in Luxembourg remain cost-effective and future-proof. In 2016, a key milestone of the reorganisation was successfully completed with the migration to Consortiamanager.com. This cloud-based software handles the complete life cycle of subscriptions, including dashboards for library administrators in our partner organisations. Since 2016, our services are modular and split into licensing and access services.
In 2022, the Aleph cataloguing software of the Luxembourg union catalogue bibnet.lu was migrated to the cloud-based Alma platform, while the Primo a-z.lu interface was migrated to the, also cloud-based, Primo VE platform. This migration entailed major changes to many parts of the backend software, such as the user management, which moved from Aleph PDS to a modern IdP system. The focus of the overall Alma migration was on physical collections, as to not overburden the process. Now the digital services will benefitting from the possibilities of the new platform: A technical, organisational and strategic analysis process is underway to modernise and streamline the historically grown different services for existing and, importantly, new partners and their desire for digital collections. During 2024, the the new services will be tested, discussed and reviewed. The launch planned for the 1st January 2025.
In any Consortium, strength lies in numbers, we are confident that the continuous reassessment of our services will attract more partners and, in turn, make our offer more attractive.
Public access
With a few exceptions, all content continues to be accessible, as in 2005, by members of the public with their National Library card. Interestingly, in terms of volume, usage by the public is comparable to usage by the University of Luxembourg. To us, this proves the reality of the knowledge society and necessity of a substantial digital library offer in a modern, lifelong learning society. Besides this public facet of the Consortium’s work, supporting the scientific and research community remains a core objective, through Open Access support, analytics and data mining interfaces for researchers and research managers (Please check the Projects page for further details on this).
Current offer
- 67.767 electronic journal titles
- 784.677 scientific eBooks
- 304 specialised databases
- 116.667 public library eBooks
- 1.641 public library audiobooks
- 20.289 streaming films (consortial group handled entirely by working group between the National library, CNA and Cité library)
Current scholarly and research partners
- National Library of Luxembourg (2002 as its own digital library, from 2006 as a consortial offer)
- University of Luxembourg (2006)
- Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, LIST (2009)
- Luxembourg Institute of Health, LIH (2009)
- Max-Planck Institute Luxembourg (2017)
- Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, LISER (2021)
Current other partners (public, training and special libraries)
- ebooks.lu (2015), a consortial group of 12 public libraries brought together by the Conseil supérieur des bibliothèques (CSB)
- bibgov.lu Governmental library (2017) by the Ministère de la Fonction publique
- IFEN e-library (2019) for the Institut de Formation de l’Education Nationale
- read-y (2020) an ebook app for secondary education students for the SCRIPT service, both with the Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse
The team
The current team of the Consortium department: Juliane Schulze and Marie-Sophie Werz, administration and licensing; Teresa Fernandez, metadata and statistics and Patrick Peiffer, head of consortium. Our offices are in the new National library in Kirchberg: 37D, avenue John F. Kennedy ; L-1855 Luxembourg.
If you have any questions or require help, please contact us via help@consortium.lu.
Further information
Please check the Projects page for further details and the Annual report 2022 of the National library (EN & FR)