“EUROPEANA LIBRARIES” PROJECT: FOSTERING DIGITIZATION ACROSS EUROPE
Adam Sofronijevic
Univerzitetska Biblioteka Svetozar Markovic
Jelena Mitrović
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Abstract
Paper presents details of the project “Europeana libraries: Aggregating digital content from Europe’s libraries” with special focus on participation of University library “Svetozar Markovic” in it. This CIP-Best Practice Network ICT-PSP project brought together 24 institutions including some of Europe’s leading research libraries from 11 countries. During the two years’ course of the project 2011-2013 with participation and support of LIBER, CERL, CENL and Europeana foundation, partnering institutions aim to build the library aggregator for Europeana and create infrastructure that will allow for ingestion into Europeana of digital materials from other research libraries across the Europe after 2013. University library “Svetozar Markovic” is the only partner in the project from a non-EU country and the region of SE Europe. Two important collections comprising 160.000 pages of old and rare books from Ottoman collection and collection on Alexander the Great will be made available to international patrons through Europeana as a result of participation of University library “Sve-tozar Markovic” in this project. Librarians from Belgrade will be partnering with colleagues from Europe on developing new metadata standard EDM (Europeana Data Model) and enhancing full-text searching capabilities and features of Europeana. Other libraries in the region will be profiting from the participation of University library “Svetozar Markovic” in this project since one of the important aims is to create aggregator for research libraries of Western Balkan countries. In the course of achieving this, research libraries from the region will be getting help on kick-starting their digitization projects, creating digital repositories and preparing metadata for ingestion into Europeana.
Key takeaways
- This gives both a ready access to the content of the libraries, but also a superb dissemination network for the work of Europeana Libraries and its ultimate purpose of producing content and tools for The European Library as the library aggregator for Europeana.
- KB/The European Library will work with the content providers to establish a realistic schedule for the ingestion of the research library content into The European Library and then Europeana.
- The aim of this work package is to communicate the activities of the Europeana Libraries project using the research library networks in Europe, at both national and institutional level, highlighting the value of the project and its considerable benefits to all stakeholders, including library intermediaries and end users.
- From January 2011 The European Library (TEL) has been performing the function of main library aggregator of Europeana.
- Librarians from Belgrade will also be collaborating with colleagues from Europe on developing new metadata standard EDM (Europeana Data Model) and enhancing full-text searching capabilities and features of Europeana, which is a planned activity of the WP 5 of the project.
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