Kristīne Pabērza Ministry of Culture State Agency Culture Information Systems Latvia Member States' Expert Group on Digitization and Digital Preservation 2nd meeting 13 December

Main Cultural Policy Postulates of Latvia (1995) National Programme Culture Long Term Cultural Policy Guidelines Medium Term Strategy Guidelines for Unified Information System of Culture Heritage and Memory Institutions Strategy of the National Digital Library Letonica 2

CIS operates under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture Main task of CIS – to preserve and provide public availability of the information sources and cultural values stored in archives, libraries and museums CIS is administering and implementing projects in the culture and memory institutions 3

State Integrated Library Information System State Archives Unified Information System Joint Catalogue of the National Holdings of Museums Library Public Access Computing Program Digital Cultural Map 4

Purpose program Cooperation of Archives, Museums and Libraries in Digital Environment ( ) Private partners: Exigen Group (software for retro-conversion) Lursoft (access to digital Cabinet of Folk songs) Tilde (History of Latvia, e-encyclopedia Letonica IT Alise (solutions for ALMs) 5

The goal of the project = to create unified online database of Latvian national bibliography by converting printed indexes and card catalogue Period of time = starting from 18th century till 2000 Scope = pages / 2,5 million records 6

1999: Conception 2000: Financial support from the Open Society Institute in Budapest 2000: special software developed by Exigen Group in close cooperation with the National Library of Latvia (for printed bibliographic indexes) 7

: financial support from Purpose program Cooperation of Archives, Museums and Libraries in Digital Environment 2001: software updates 2003 onwards: financial support from the budget of the State Integrated Library Information System : software for card catalogue 8

9 Main benefits from results of partnership: Software allows to manage full cycle starting from scanning till structured MARC record and export into online database Comparing to manual work use of software allows to reduce time for conversion 6 times and to save up required financial resources 4 times

Partnership between the National Library of Latvia, company Lursoft IT and state agency Culture information systems Main goal = to provide an online access to the full texts of newspapers, magazines and journals while searching in the National Analytics database (NAD) Latvia publishes ~600 serials annually, and 2/3 of them are catalogued in NAD 10

Company IT Lursoft ( provides a digital library of newspapers which: offers access to more than 40 serials and reviews of press agencies facilitates reading of full texts provides connection with the linked information in the databases of enterprises and other official registers by the same interface 11

In May 2005 Lursoft IT started the automated delivery of electronic descriptions These metadata are daily extracted automatically from the newespaper lay-outs delivered to Lursoft IT by publishers The descriptions for current day periodicals are delivered till 3 a.m. daily 12

Authorized NLL staff members have the right to: include these descriptions into the National Analytics database enrich the received information according to the requirements of MARC21 The database of the National Analytics is located on NLL server, but the full texts – on Lursoft IT server. CIS provides an import of daily-received files into the system Aleph500. The linkage of the National Analytics database record with the respective full text is performed using the unique identification 13

14

15

16

17

18

Publishing, metadata and access provided at the same day NLL receives extracted metadata of current day e-articles Quality of records improves – grammar errors that could occur re-writing title or author manually are eliminated Publishers get reliable statistical data on the most frequently accessed articles and authors Publishers and Lursoft IT attract new users Users can easily switch from the full text of the article to the linked information 19

Till 2006: various dispersed projects; different technologies; minimal use of metadata From 2006: Latvian Digital Library Letonica – unified platform; common standards; Digital Object Management System; partnership and collaboration; long-term preservation and accessibility with respect to copyright 20

1. Digitization of national culture heritage in all memory institutions 2. Web harvesting 3. Conversion of required card catalogue into databases 4. Repository of digital publications 21

Partners: National Library of Latvia State Agency Culture Information Systems Microsoft Latvia Pilot project Jāzeps Vītols National Library of Latvia Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music Centre of Early Music Latvian Academic Library Latvian State Archive of Film, Photo, Audiovisual Documents Individuals (professors etc.) a.o. 22

23

Project Raduraksti: Latvia State Historical Archives Central Microphotocopying and Document Restoration Laboratory Directorate General of Latvia State Archives Main goal – to create and support resources available for genealogical and family research Currently images available From December 4th – more than users 24

25

26

27

28 About 5,1 million museum objects Growth – museum objects per year

State Unified Library Information System Library Public Access Computing Program National Digital Library Letonica Joint Catalogue of the National Holdings of Museums Unified State Archives Information System Management System for Development of Creative Industry and Cultural Education Latvian Digital Culture Map Latvian National Digital Encyclopaedia 29

30 Thank you!