The BNL will make 500 books available on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October. These books are surplus to requirements. (Photo: Matic Zorman/Maison Moderne)

The BNL will make 500 books available on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October. These books are surplus to requirements. (Photo: Matic Zorman/Maison Moderne)

The Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg is getting rid of its surplus books. They will be available on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October. The donations collected through this operation will be used to restore the archives.

On 28 and 29 October, it will be possible to pick up books at any price. The Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg (BNL) is getting rid of its surplus books. The donations it receives will help finance the restoration of its archives.

The work is continuous. “We are always restoring heritage documents, newspapers,” or posters, which are being highlighted for this operation. This has a cost: €1,000 on average per poster, and depends on the condition. In terms of time, it can take “from a few hours to a few days.”

This is an essential step in order to be able to digitise these documents. It will also make them available to as many people as possible ), while allowing them to survive over the centuries, particularly for research purposes.

A dedicated budget of €400,000 in 2021

“The digitisation of posters and valuable documents is carried out by us. It can take from a few minutes to a few hours. Then there is the integration into the catalogue, the addition of metadata and putting them online. Sometimes it is necessary to clarify the copyright.” Mass digitisation is outsourced to an external company. “Beforehand, we have to carry out an analysis of the corpus and clarify the copyright. Several quality controls are then carried out, the documents are put into OCR [optical character recognition] format and completed with metadata to be put online. This takes, on average, about fifteen months.”

The BNL is 100% funded by the state. In 2021, it had spent €400,000 of its €16.3m budget on restoration and binding.

500 books available

The institution has not set an amount to be raised or a number of posters to be restored through next week’s operation. This is not a new event, but it is back after three years of absence, between and covid. The amount raised in previous editions is not known.

Although its website speaks of a hundred or so books available, there will in fact be 500, says the library. They will be of all genres, in Luxembourgish, German, French and English. Why does the BNL have too many? “There are publishers who send us more copies than we ask for,” it says.

To collect some books, come to the BNL between 8am and 6pm on Friday 28 October, or between 10am and 4pm on Saturday 29 October.

The BNL also has 1.8m printed documents, 200,000 of which are available for direct access in the reading room. The rest, stored in “shops,” can be reserved for rental.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.