The Bibliotheca Mariana Lovaniensis is a unique source for the studies relating to Holy Virgin. When this collection was transferred to the Catholic University of Leuven’s Faculty of Theology, a catalogue was produced on CD-ROM containing the descriptions of approximately 23000 documents in all languages and covering the period 1470 to 2001.

The mission of this library, which was started in 1935 by the Belgian priest Léon Arendt, was to be a centre for documentation and information for all aspects of Mariology and Marian worship: theology, liturgy, devotion, spirituality, history, archaeology, iconography, art and literature. When it was transferred to the Montfort Fathers in Leuven in 1961, it contained more than 16,500 manuscripts, editions, brochures and periodicals. The concern to make the collection even more accessible to academic research and to preserve it under the best possible conditions led to a joint agreement with the Catholic University of Leuven, signed in 1996, which allowed the library to be integrated into LIBIS, the university’s electronic LAN catalogue.

While the Bibliotheca Mariana Lovaniensis cannot compete with the University of Dayton’s famous Marian Library in terms of quantity, it is still very important because it contains a large selection of documents not found in Dayton’s on-line catalogue. To facilitate access to the Bibliotheca Mariana Lovaniensis, it seemed useful to collect all the entries on CD-ROM.

This CD-ROM catalogue, which uses WinSpirs software, permits searches in one or more fields (author, title, ISBN/ISSN, publisher, date, etc.). The user can sort the entries and use truncation or wildcard symbols. The catalogue also contains an index of all the terms.

The Bibliotheca Mariana Lovaniensis is located in the library of the Catholic University of Leuven’s Faculty of Theology, St.-Michielsstraat 6, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium). Tel: +32 16 32 38 13. Fax: + 32 16 32 38 62 gbib@theo.kuleuven.ac.be. It can be consulted on-line via http://www.bib.kuleuven.ac.be.

Price of the CD-ROM: € 12.50 (+ shipping). For further information on the CD-ROM, please contact: denise.delvaux@bib.kuleuven .ac.be ou wouter.schallier@bib.kuleuven.ac.be