The Royal Library of Belgium at the Crossroads

Abstract

The Royal Library of Belgium, created in 1559, is the central research library of the country. The national library, which is one of its six departments, has two sections: Legal Deposit, and Belgian Bibliography and National Documentation. The fact that the area covered by Belgium was occupied in the past by several countries has resulted in a scattering over Europe of many of the library's treasures. Belgium became a federal state in 1994, consisting of three cultural communities and three physical regions, and four linguistic regions. It has also become the centre of the European Union. The new structure of the library does not however take into account the implications of the new constitution for the transfer to the communities of responsibilities in the field of cultural patrimony. The major objective of the library's management in the immediate future will be reconciling the library's structure with its new political and institutional framework. The administrative or physical separation of the function of National Library from the other functions of the Royal Library is now under consideration, but it could be difficult to realize. Technical facilities should be developed, as this is much more feasible. The future of the Royal Library might be seen as the virtual library of federal Belgium, ‘combining an on-site collection of current and heavily used materials in both print and electronic form with an electronic network which would provide access to, and delivery from, external worldwide library and commercial information and knowledge sources’.