The Université catholique de Louvain was founded in 1425 in Leuven (Belgium). In 1970, the university was established in Louvain-la-Neuve. Nowadays, UCL has 10 faculties, 50 departments, 200 research units, centers of excellence and doctoral schools.

Brief history
The university hosts 5,000 teachers, researchers and associates, 21,000 students (120 nationalities), 6,000 doctoral students, 200 research contracts. UCL has 130,000 alumni in Belgium and worldwide. Within the Faculty of Economics, Social and Political Sciences, 25 Master degree programs and 10 PhD degree programs are currently offered.

The Library of Economics, Social and Political Sciences is part of a local network of 9 libraries. The library serves 360 faculties and researchers and more than 4,500 students (especially from the Louvain Department of Economics, the Louvain School of Management and the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics-CORE). The library is located in a 4 levels building with 500 study places, 45 workstations providing access to all the bibliographic information and electronic resources, 3 group workrooms and wifi connection. The library maintains close partnerships with local research libraries in Social Sciences.

Collections
The Library of Economics’ collections holds more than 130,000 volumes, 450 current periodicals and audio-visual material. At the level of the whole university, the UCL Libraries' collections contain 2 million volumes, more than 5,000 periodicals and give access to more than 16,100 electronic periodicals. The electronic resources (provided centrally to the whole of the users and libraries) give access to 85 databases across all major subject areas (i.e. Datastream, Amadeus, Bel-First, Econlit, ABI Inform, Helecon).

For more information about our digital holdings, visit the website of the Library.