Digitisation of Cultural Heritage at the National Library of Latvia: Past and Future Uldis Zariņš Head of Strategic Development National Library of Latvia

Goals  To digitise and make as widely accessible as possible the entire Latvian published cultural heritage  To support digitisation with IT infrastructure, services, common standards and methodology  To create digital services and embed the digital content in today’s information landscape

Tasks  To digitise analogue and acquire born-digital cultural heritage materials  To ensure long-term preservation of digital heritage  To ensure availability and access of digital heritage  To maintain standarts, methodology, best- practice, research on digitisation  To lead the co-operation in digitisation on a national and international level

History  Pilot projects –  Establishment –  Development –

Content  23 digital collections – mostly pilot projects to develop methodology and test technologies, some to be merged 3+ m pages of periodicals (~1000 titles) 1+ m pages of books (~7000 titles) ~ images (maps, posters, photos etc.) ~2000 audio files ~3000 harvested internet sites of.lv domain

Periodicals (1)  – Mantojums 1 –Scaning, PDF, no OCR  – Periodika.lv v.1. –Scanning and segmentation, OCR and full-text search  – Periodika.lv v.2. –Scanning and segmentation, OCR and full-text search, interactive features

Periodicals (2)  Timespan: –  Content: newspapers, magazines, journals  Languages: Latvian, German, Russian, Latgalian etc.  pages  titles

Periodicals (3)

Periodicals (4)

Books

Photos

Maps

Audio records

Infrastructure  DOM2 – system for management and preservation of digital objects  Specialised front-ends for different types of content  Tool for building digital collections on top of DOM2  Piping – data and file transformations, user management, import/export, etc.

Know-how  Digitisation handbook  Translation and adaptation of standarts  Training and consultations  Co-operation with partners

Future (1)  Aggregated search  A mobile front-end  New front-end for images  National academic repository  Digitisation on demand service

Future (2)  Contextualisation, data models, semantic search  Use of crowdsourcing  Discoverability and usability of resources  Synergies with education, research, tourism, creative industries  National and international partnerships

Towards national approach Strategy for digital cultural heritage Coordinated approach –Content priorities –Build-up and distribution of know-how –Shared standarts, data models, vocabularies –Content distribution –Shared infrastructure (?) –Centralised services (?) A national network based around 1-3 competence centres

Goal To create a united and freely accessible digital environment for Latvian cultural heritage with an aim to strengthen the national identity and to ensure accessibility, preservation and inclusion of Latvian national cultural and scientific heritage in the European and world digital cultural landscape.

Questions? Thank you!