September 24, 2009
Enabling the Library to offer thousands of historical newspaper pages online, DigiTool guarantees the success of the Library’s digitization program
Hamburg, Germany – September 24, 2009. Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce that the DigiTool® digital asset management solution has gone live at the National Library of Luxembourg. Using the DigiTool platform, the National Library—which also runs the Ex Libris Aleph® integrated library system, MetaLib® gateway and metasearch portal, and SFX® OpenURL link resolver—has made the nation’s 160-year-old newspaper archive available online, at www.eluxemburgensia.lu.
The archive contains over 800,000 historical news reports, analyses, articles, advertisements, pictures, and obituaries from 100,000 newspaper pages, including items in German, French, and Luxembourgish. Among the collections that have already been digitized are the archives of the prestigious Luxemburger Wort (Luxembourg Word), from the first issue in 1848 to 1869, and the Tageblatt (Daily Paper), from the first issue in 1913 to 1950. The National Library of Luxembourg utilizes DigiTool to manage digitized daily newspapers and make them publicly available. The National Library also plans to digitize its entire printed archive of over six million documents in the coming years.
The compliance of DigiTool with METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) and the product’s incorporation of ALTO (analyzed layout and text object) technology were important factors in the National Library’s selection of this Ex Libris solution. METS and ALTO enable DigiTool to perform a full-text search and to display results at the article level and page level, with the item from the search highlighted in the display of the results.
The director of the National Library, Monique Kieffer, commented: ”We are pleased to have made our newspaper archive available to the public via the eluxemburgensia Web site. The advanced DigiTool technology has enabled us to easily manage and provide access to digitized versions of newspapers that had been starting to decay, and will make many thousands of historical articles available to the public and to international researchers.”
”We are delighted that the National Library of Luxembourg has made its important newspaper collection available online with DigiTool,” noted Ullrich Jungling, sales and marketing director at Ex Libris (Deutschland) GmbH. ”It has been a pleasure to work in partnership with the National Library over the recent months. We will continue to work closely with the National Library, as with every member of the European customer community, to meet the evolving needs of library staff and users.”
About the National Library of Luxembourg
The National Library of Luxembourg is the successor to the first public library established in Luxembourg in 1798 by the French authorities. Only in 1899 was the name National Library first used. The National Library is located in the center of the City of Luxembourg in a building that was constructed at the beginning of the seventeenth century to house a Jesuit college. Guardian of the printed heritage of Luxembourg, the National Library collects all publications printed and published in Luxembourg and also houses a large multilingual collection of international origin. The total collection numbers about 1.3 million items. The digitization project of the National Library started in 2003. The legal deposit will be extended to publications that originate as digital objects, as well as Web sites.
For additional information on the National Library of Luxembourg, see http://www.bnl.lu/index.html.
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. Offering the only comprehensive product suite for electronic, digital, and print materials, Ex Libris provides efficient, user-friendly products that serve the needs of libraries today and will facilitate their transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents.
Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with customers, Ex Libris enables libraries to maximize productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.
For additional information on Ex Libris Group, see our Web site, visit our Initiatives and Commentary blogs, and follow our Twitter page.
