With a collection of approx. 680,000 books, 130,000 eBooks, and 28,000 licensed digital journals, the WU University Library is Austria’s largest business and economics library, and one of the largest in the German-speaking world. The ongoing expansion of the literature collection and the development of new services and training programs help WU staff and students in their work.
Read!t
The new tool read!t makes it easier for course instructors to prepare well-structured reading lists for their courses, giving students convenient access to the literature they need. Since the start of the 2021 summer semester, teachers can activate read!t themselves on the LEARN eLearning platform and add reading lists to each course’s learning materials.
Library Website Relaunch
The new library website takes the needs of different groups of users into account, such as WU students, faculty, staff, or users who are not members of the WU community. Each target group has a section of the website with custom-tailored information. The menu item “Consultation,” for example, offers users all they need to know about the library’s comprehensive range of information and consulting services. Under “WU Research Results”, users can find out more about publication platforms like ePubWU and Open Journal Systems as well as research data management.
Collaborative Project Rooms
In 2021, WU equipped many of its project rooms with interactive screens. The whiteboard function allows people working together in groups to access the whiteboard in the project room simultaneously and with multiple devices, facilitating cooperation. The large screens also allow users to edit files directly on the screen, while the integrated camera can also be used to hold virtual or hybrid meetings. Most of these collaborative spaces for WU students are located in the Central Library.
Kurt W. Rothschild Letters
The WU Library manages the estate of Kurt W. Rothschild, including around 1,270 books and archival materials, mostly correspondence. In 2021, WU received a donation of an additional 821 letters from 1948–1979. Each of the newly added letters was logged, described, and digitized. Maintaining this collection is an important contribution to the digital preservation of academic cultural assets. After all, these documents are a unique resource for economic and contemporary historical research.
The University Library has been conducting a provenance research project since 2010, systematically investigating the origins of all books published before 1945 and acquired by the library after 1933. Based on the results of their investigations, seven books have been restored to their rightful owners.
During an event at Vienna’s Jewish Museum on July 22, 2021, Library Director Nikolaus Berger returned a book published in 1881 which had come in the possession of the library of the University of World Trade, the organization that would later become WU, during the Nazi years. The book is a report by Julius Ritter von Neuwald, then vice-mayor of Vienna, on Vienna’s municipal administration during the years from 1877 to 1879. The volume originally belonged to the Viennese textiles magnate Sigmund Mayer (1831–1920), who became a delegate to the Vienna City Council in 1880.