University Library Collaboration in Belgium: Successes and Obstacles

The paper starts with a description of the complexity of the Belgian nation and an overview of its universities. During the term of the authors' librarianship at their university, there were regular meetings with their colleagues from the other universities, both at a national and a Flemish level. For both, a brief description is given of the actions originating from these collaborations. Nevertheless, these collaborations were also influenced negatively by the existing competitivity between their universities. At a national level, this led to a failure of the dream of installing a unified library management system. At a Flemish level, resentments were raised by the discussion on how to divide the funding that the Ministry of Education had allocated for the acquisition of digital journals.