Alma Mater, the Digital Library of the Ancient Archive of the University of Coimbra (UC), Portugal, and the thematic repository Digital Republic are already online. Unpublished documents about the emergence of republican ideas in Coimbra, the implementation of Portuguese Republic and the resistance to Dictatorial Regime as well as other valorous original versions of documents, in French, Latin, English, Portuguese and other languages, of the precious UC collection are accessible by Internet at http://almamater.uc.pt/ .

Alma Mater, the Digital Library of the Ancient Archive of the University of Coimbra, allows any person connected to Internet to access globally the digital documents of the university libraries. Ancient books, manuscripts, letters, photographs and drawings, and also collections by authors graduated at UC, such as the writer Almeida Garret and the botanists Félix Avelar Brotero and Júlio Henriques, and by others that studied and leaved there their intellectual works, may be consulted in detail. 

Alma Mater is a broad collection of significant works of the precious archive existing in the diverse UC libraries – around four thousand documents, the majority published before 1940, and almost 500 thousand related images are available online. This initiative integrates the commemorative agenda of the Portuguese Republic Centenary.

The thematic repository Digital Republic (http://almamater.uc.pt/index.asp?f=RDUC ) is allocated to Alma Mater and gathers varied illustrative documents of the political, social, scientific and artistic changes leveraged by the implantation of Portuguese Republic: unpublished and almost unknown manuscripts, photographs of the beginning of the XX century, newspapers, manifestos, scientific magazines, original correspondence and university works. Testimonies on the republican ideas influence in Coimbra are also enhanced in this repository, especially in the volumes “Memórias” and the photos of the Colonel Belizário Pimenta, in the collection of the cartography historian Armando Cortesão or even in the papers “Gazeta de Coimbra”, “Ultimato”, “Resistência” and “Revolta.”

Incorporated in a strategy of development and modernization of UC, concerning digitalization, conservation and diffusion of documents and information available in the university libraries, Alma Mater congregates and values important nucleus that integrate the rich bibliographic and documental patrimony of diverse digital libraries already online – the ones of the Faculty of Law, the Botanic Department of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology and the University of Coimbra General Library (UCGL) – and also from recent ones, as the digital library of the Faculty of Letters. Developed by the University of Coimbra Libraries Integrated System in partnership with UCGL and Municipal Library of Coimbra, this project was financed by the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Portuguese Government as well as by UC own funds.