Library Material Digitisation Project Coordination and E-Content National Aggregator in the Field of Culture

Zoran Krstulović ; Mojca Šavnik

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 21 (2012) no. 1.

Résumé

In 2007, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia designated in the Strategy of Information Society Development in the Republic of Slovenia – si2010 the vision and defined the goal of e-content development – to ensure access to the e-contents in the Slovenian language in all fields that significantly influence the life and work of an individual. In the field of culture accelerated digitisation of existing analogue content, inclusion into the European digital cultural space and further development of the Digital Library of Slovenia have been especially stressed. In 2006, the National and University Library (NUK) established the Digital Library Development and Strategy Division, which manages all digital library processes and procedures. The article describes the basic tasks and objectives of the Division, including regular digitisation of library material and digital collections' metadata description. Recently, a new objective has been developed as a result of the needs of a wider Slovenian library community – i.e. co-ordination of digitisation in the Slovenian libraries. Lately, the established possibility of a deeper cooperation between the key actors in the fields of culture and science and the desire to coordinate the e-content creation have been reflected in the decision by the Ministry of Culture to establish the national e-content aggregator in the field of culture. The Ministry has appointed the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia as the national e-content aggregator. The European digital library Europeana defines aggregator as »an organization that gathers metadata from many cultural content providers and channels them into Europeana«. In the project outline, the purpose of the national aggregator development in Slovenia is defined more widely than in the Europeana context, i.e. »to enable a single point of web access to the Slovenian e-content in the field of culture, and to begin with the establishment of conditions for long-term preservation of e-content in the fields of culture and science«.