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Looking at the size of its collections and the number of users, the Library of Human Sciences is the most important of the four main School and Interdepartmental libraries of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
In the early nineties a project took shape to build a new library for the Human Sciences, as library resources and services had become scattered across the campus due to a lack of space in the original library buildings. The facilities and services needed to be adapted to the evolution of library management and to the needs of a growing number of users.
Building a new library was also motivated by the university’s educational objective to increase student autonomy and to stimulate critical thinking and individual research. It was within this framework that the Electronic Economics Library was installed in the new building of the Library of Human Sciences in 1995.
In the Library of Human Sciences 2,110 seats and 120 workstations are available to the 19,000 students and 3,000 staff members of the University. The library OPAC, available through a Web interface, is supported by the UNICORN library management system since 1997. The workstations also provide access to the library Web site which presents practical information about the library, a description of the resources available and a thematic search tool.
Collections
Users have access to more than 50 networked databases and more than 4500 full-text electronic journals in the humanities (of which 50% is in the field of Economics) and to selected resources available on the Internet.
The fifth level of the Library of Human Sciences is devoted to the Economic sciences collections which includes books, periodicals, statistics publications and annual reports, economics newspapers, discussion papers and working papers collections, and electronic resources. One of the working rooms has been turned into the “Electronic Economics Library”, a specific research area for final year students and researchers in economics. The room is equipped with eight additional PCs providing access to selected electronic information resources, bibliographic and factual databases, full-text electronic journals, and links to selected relevant Web sites.
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The Electronic Economics Library (EEL) is managed by a university graduate, in collaboration with the Faculty of Economics. It aims to provide easy access to information resources and tools in economics, in order to enhance the training quality of the students and to facilitate research. The EEL Web site is a gateway to local and remote resources in economics and management.
The databases which are of special interest to economists include:
- JSTOR, Wall Street Journal, ABI full-text and ECONLIT, which are directly available through the Internet;
- BELFIRST, AMADEUS, BELGOSTAT, CHELEM, International Statistical Yearbook, OECD, which are hosted on a devoted server and are available from the Electronic Economics Library room as well as from the researchers’ office;
- more than 1000 full-text electronic journals
The Library is a depositary for documents from the European Union, International Monetary Fund, OECD, European Patent Office and Institut National de Statistique.
Institutional repositories
The ULB libraries are running an OAI compatible archive for student theses. In the near future full-text scientific publications from ULB researchers will also be made available online.
Digital Library Projects
The ULB Libraries have been active for almost a decade in several regional, national and international digital library projects. Currently running projects include:
- Unicat – Towards a Belgian virtual union catalogue: to establish a gateway allowing users to simultaneously search and retrieve bibliographic records from Belgian library catalogues
- Black Skin Dermatology Online: to establish a multilingual web platform for teledermatology on black skin, integrating image and voice recognition technologies
- BICTEL/e - Phase 1: construction of institutional repositories of electronic theses and e-prints in the 'Communauté française de Belgique’
- BICTEL/e - Phase 2: installation of an OpenUrl resolver in the 'Communauté française de Belgique’
- The Electronic Economics Library (EEL) has also been a test partner in the European project DECOMATE II.
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