The Brussels Royal Library of Belgium, better known as the KBR, is the country's national library and responsible for collecting and preserving all Belgian publications. To achieve that, all Belgian authors are obliged to hand over copies of their publication in the KBR Legal Deposit via wettelijkdepot.be. This legal obligation is applicable to both legal entities and natural persons who act on their own---any Belgian author, even if you self-publish your work.

All submitted work, through the Legal Deposit, eventually ends up in the official Belgium Bibliography that monthly publishes lists of new entries of all non-periodic publications (thus excluding magazines). This electronic archive goes back to 1998 and should be a complete list of what is being published in Belgium---or, like in my latest case, abroad by Belgian authors. For the curios ones, legal texts concerning the obligation to deposit are readily available online.

To submit a work to the KBR Legal Deposit, if it's in physical form, they require two copies. You fill in two copies of a letter to describe the author, the publisher, and the work, and after a week or two, one letter, now stamped to approve the deposit, is sent back to you. Digital publications can also be uploaded, together with a form to describe its legal space: is this going to be published in the KBR as open access or can people simply lend a copy like in a regular library?

When I published Red Zuurdesem in 2020, I found KBR information by accident. I presume Belgian publishers will do this for you, but back then I self-published the Dutch work, and for The Creative Programmer, it's published in New York so they won't care. The Legal Deposit process was quite fun to do actually, once I managed to find the correct letter template and knew what to fill in.

Next to the obvious ISBN number, to more easily categorize works, a "NUR" and "KBR" entry has to be filled in---and, ideally, printed in the front matter of the work itself. "NUR" means Nederlandstalige Uniforme Rubrieksindeling (Dutch Uniform Classification), a three-part code that summarizes the subject. For example, Red Zuurdesem has NUR 440:

• 400: Non-fiction leisure/general
• 440: Foot and drinks general

This works a bit like the ACM classification system but again is of limited use: to foreign publications such as The Creative Programmer, the number itself is not present in the book so not officially part of anything. And then there's the "KBR" text which groups works by publisher. In case of my self-published work, that's simply "D/2020/Wouter Groeneveld, uitgever".

And that's it, after the librarians and archivists did their work, your work is now both nationally preserved and loanable in the Royal Library! That is, if you can find it in the enormous catalog... A search for "The Creative Programmer" yields thousands results except my work, and searching by name doesn't seem to particularly help either.

I eventually found my work in the digital library: Red Zuurdesem has a permalink at https://opac.kbr.be/LIBRARY/doc/SYRACUSE/21206019 and The Creative Programmer has been marked as received and pending for archival---who knows how many parcels the KBR Legal Deposit receives each week? With that link you can request a digitization, check where the books (two copies, remember?) are, and reserve one, which will first have to be dug out in the labyrinth below the library.

In 2012, when I still worked in Brussels, I went on a guided tour that led us below the library, deep within its archival catacombs. I don't remember much of it except that it was impressive and vast. There's a bit of historical information on The KBR but I can't find much about the underground tunnels that harbor the hard work of Belgium's authors. Perhaps pictures weren't and still aren't allowed. It's somehow soothing to think that while strolling around in the neighborhood of the KBR building in Brussels, you're walking over a gigantic amount of cultural heritage.

Of which four books now carry my name!

As a researcher, my university obliges me to upload papers in their own repository system, which, after a pre-set embargo if applicable, will become accessible to anyone, regardless of the stupid paywalls of some journals or conference proceedings. I also try to upload a pre-print version to https://arxiv.org/ just in case. Easy accessibility is important!

As a book author (at least for me), you want your work to be easily available to be read---and hopefully, appreciated---by as many people as possible. I still have a few physical copies that I'm planning to donate to my local library, but the book purchase procedure is quite complicated. On top of that, libraries regularly clean and restock their shelves, sometimes based on the amount of times a work was effectively lend. Since both works are a bit obscure, I think after a few years mine would end in the discount bin anyway!

And then there's the option to add a book to the Internet Archive Library. I still have to figure out whether or not it's possible to do so since licensing agreements with my publisher prevent me from releasing The Creative Programmer as open access.