6th National Congress of Public Libraries

It is a pleasure to announce that the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, through its Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination, will be celebrating its 6th National Congress of Public Libraries in Burgos, Spain, next 9, 10 and 11 October 2012, under the theme: Public Libraries: individual memory, global heritage.

This will also be an Europeana event, which will include speakers from Spain, Europe and the rest of the world. The Congress is also organised in collaboration with the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León and the Municipality of Burgos.

The sessions will be related to the following themes:

The impact of the digital in library services:

• Online services.
• Changes in the model of loans.
• Changes in the model of information search.
• Changes in the collection management: e-books and other digital resources.
• Copyright and digital contents –creation, access and dissemination-.

 Libraries and their communities in the digital era:

• People’s engagement/involvement.
• Virtual space vs. Physical space.
• Library services for different population groups and professional sectors.
• The value of libraries to impulse social inclusion and local economical development.
• The participation of the people in the creation of digital content, and the role of libraries as drivers of these projects to give them global reach.
• The contribution of the people to the enrichment of digital contents: social tagging, social networks, etc.
• The library as content aggregator.
• Libraries and their support to the interest in local and family history and cultural tourism.
• Reusing the library contents as an essential value of libraries.

Cooperation with archives, museums, audiovisual institutions and other organisations in digital projects

•  Preservation of contents from the local sphere in the digital sphere, preservation of the oral tradition, intangible heritage, etc.
• Preservation of current contents to access them in the future.
• Creation of digital contents in different media: audio, text, image, 3-dimensional objects, etc.
• Initiatives of libraries for the digital dissemination and preservation of the cultural movements of its municipality.
• Projects that give a common access to library, archives, museum and audiovisual resources.

The opening of the registration period will be announced soon.

More information can be found -currently only in Spanish-here:
http://www.mcu.es/bibliotecas/novedades/2012/novedades_02.html

Updates will follow.

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport
Spain

EDGE International Public Libraries Conference 2012

Colleagues!

Please join us in Edinburgh on 1st and 2nd March for EDGE 2012. Find out how we are building new library hubs! Finalists for UK Public Sector digital awards and winners of Libraries change Lives award for Prison work, Children in Care and youth work.

Hear fabulous speakers from Italy, New York and Chicago. Not to be missed!

I am sending you the link to the awards submission page http://edgeconference.co.uk and of course the bookings section http://edgeconference.co.uk/booking/ (all best viewed in Mozilla).

Liz McGettigan
Libraries and Information Services Manager
The City of Edinburgh Council

Spain: Training Programme for Library Professionals from Ibero-America 2011

From last 17 October to 11 November this Subdirectorate of Libraries Coordination held the activities for Ibero-American librarians it had included in the Training Programme for Ibero-American Professionals of the Cultural Sector 2011. This Subdirectorate participates each year, in this Training Programme, called by the Ministry of Culture of Spain, from 1998.

2011 Participants and the Subdirectorate Team

 In every edition, different training stays in public and academic  Spanish libraries, a month long, are organised. The aim of these stays is for the professionals to become acquainted with the working and organisation of their destination’s institution in general, and more specifically with those aspects of their interest so that, when they go back to their countries they can apply this to some innovation or new project at their libraries.  A course is also organised on site in Spain, every year it deals with different technical, organising, skills and services aspects related t the theme chosen in each occasion.

 This year, the 15th edition of this programme –in 1999 two of them were held- the theme has been Digital Libraries. The contents have included: planning for a project of digital library, process of creating digital collections, selection criteria, technical aspects and treatment of digital objects, standards and digital policies application, legal aspects, and digital information search, retrieval and conservation systems. The programme has included a stay in the region of Galicia as well as the visit from Madrid to other Spanish towns to visit different libraries and highlighted virtual library projects.

This year's logo of the course

 The stays  were also held during this time: 4 inpublic libraries and 2 in academic libraries. The stays regarding the theme Management of Public Libraries were held in the State Public Library of Salamanca, in the Library of Andalucía, in the Library Service of the Diputaciò de Barcelona and in the  State Public Library of Murcia.  The stays on Managament of Academic Libraries were held in Academic Library of the Complutense University and in the Bibliographic and Documental Service from the University ofAlicante, which have been collaborating with great interest in this Training Programme for several years.

 From 1998 until now, more than 270 Ibero-American library professional have participated in this programme and its multiplying effect has been proved with the launching of projects  about which several reposts have been sent to this Subdirectorate.

First course, 1998 brochure

The objective of these activities, besides contributing to the training of library professionals, is also for Ibero-American professionals to know other professionals from Ibero-American countries. It is a consolidated programme of this Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination, which is intended to be repeated in the coming years, renewing and updating its contents and projects.

More information here

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Culture
Spain

Polish Digitisation Programmes: 2010 Overview

In the last year the National Library of Poland continued to enhance its digital library cBN Polona, using its own resources and funds from numerous national and international projects.  Near the end of the year 2010, cBN Polona contained 27,677 digitised items. According to statistics provided by the program Werbalizer cBN Polona had 749,581 visitors in 2010.

The National Library also performed the role of National Competence Centre for the digitisation of library materials by organizing trainings, practices and consultations for librarians. In November 2010 the first Polish handbook for the digitisation of the cultural heritage was published by the National Library.

In January 2010 the National Library launched the implementation of the project ACADEMICA – Digital Library of Scientific Publications carried out in cooperation with the Scientific and Academic Network, which in 2009 was awarded a grant of 34,000,000 PLN by the EU’s Operational Programme – Innovative Economy. Thanks to the funds from ACADEMICA the National Library was able to buy three automatic book scanners and now has the best-equipped digitisation studio in Poland.

Tomasz Makowski

Director General of the National Library of Poland

300,000 New Pages at the Spanish Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers

The Ministry of Culture has just digitised 300,000 more pages that have been integrated into the Spanish Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers.

The project is the result of cooperation between the Directorate General of Books, Archives and Libraries (through the Subdirectorate General for Library Coordination) and Autonomous Regions and scientific and cultural institutions including universities, municipalities, foundations athenaeums and even newspapers publishers with origins dating back to 19thand the beginning of the last century. Its aim is not only to preserve, but also to offer access to bibliographic materials that are denoted for being unique copies and, therefore, not easily accessible.

It is harvested by Hispana, through which it contributes to the Europeana project.

As of November 2011, it includes 5.713.462 titles from 1971 newspapers that cover a wide chronological period between 1777 and 2009. These newspapers were printed in 160 Spanish towns.

This year the Ministry of Culture has signed an agreement with the Association of Spanish Cultural Magazines that is allowing to include current contents in the database.

A new version of the library was launched recently, with an important new function: the ability to search for any word on any page of any digital newspaper.

Here you can watch a video presenting the library:

More information can be found in its website.

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Culture
Spain

Video: Spanish Libraries

Would you like to see what Spanish libraries are like? Here you can watch the video that was presented in the 4th Leipzig German Congress of Libraries and Information that took place in Leipzig in March 2010, where Spain was the guest country.

The video is available at  the Spanish Ministry of Culture Youtube Channel and also in Travesía, from which we informed in a former post.

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Culture
Spain

Travesía – Digital resources for library cooperation

Travesia came into being in 2000 as the Spanish Public Libraries Portal and has since developed into a digital library that supports library cooperation within the Spanish libraries systems.

Objectives of Travesía

• Publish the necessary regulatory texts for cooperative library projects.
• Organise, preserve and distribute electronic publications produced or funded by the Subdirectorate General of Library Coordination.
• Provide unrestricted, open access to complete documents in text and audiovisual formats.

The complete texts of the documents are included, authors rights permitting. Otherwise Travesía gathers all the metadata and links to the document on the publisher’s website.

Travesía has a multi-lingual interface in Spain’s official languages as well as in English.

Communities and collections

Travesía currently has two major blocks of information:

• Library Standards is a very extensive block which includes the norms, standards, guidelines, recommendations and declarations issued by State regulatory bodies and State and International cooperation bodies in the library area. It has two well-defined collections, one of legislation (European, State and Regional) and a collection of technical standards in use in the library sector.

• Publications by the Subdirectorate General of Library Coordination with a view to distributing and preserving the publications generated by its coordination activities in the Spanish library sector: monographs, conferences, meetings, standards, etc.

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Culture
Spain

The Digital Library of Romania

The second important program of the national system of libraries is represented by the Digital Library of Romania.

At present there is not in Romania any national program for the digitisation of the written culture patrimony. An effort has been done towards this direction in 2010, when a national aggregator was arbitrary established within the structure of the Ministry of Culture, from up to down, without a correlation with the real state of affairs. Last year, in 2010, following the anti-crisis measures, this phantom institution was dissolved.  

The intricate state of affairs in Romania has lead to the establishing of a partnership between the de facto National Library of Romania, which is the Library of the Academy of Romania, the holder of the written culture patrimony of Romania and the Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, which has made an important investment for the creation of its own material basis, necessary for the process of digitisation.

In spite of the absence of a national coordination for the digitisation process, the double or multiple digitisation of the same title in other libraries is prevented due to two peculiar states of affairs:

• 62% of the Romanian periodicals exist in a single issue and that is preserved by the Library of the Academy of Romania;
• 45% of the Romanian books are unique and preserved by the Library of the Academy of Romania.

Florin ROTARU
General Director
Metropolitan Library of Bucharest

The European Congress on E-Inclusion 2011

The European Congress on E-Inclusion 2011: ‘Transforming Access to Digital Europe in Public Libraries’ (ECEI11) will take place on the 6th and 7th of September at the European Parliament and the Committee of the Regions in Brussels.

More information:http://www.ecei11.eu/

NAPLE Secretariat

Lithuanian Public Libraries: Digitisation of Cultural Heritage & Elibrary

Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania is in charge for 4 public funded projects in this area:

Project “Development of Lithuanian integrated library information system LIBIS”, provides access to national union OPAC (www.libis.lt) and individual libraries catalogues, allows users to reserve books and use common user card in whole network of public and other participating libraries in Lithuania Project “Development of Virtual Electronic Heritage System” involves libraries, museums, archives and is aimed digitising out of copyright materials to be presented on common national portal http://www.epaveldas.lt Selected materials appears on Europeana portal. In the second phase of the project about 3 mln. pages of publications, 17 thousand museum objects and 130 thousand digitised vinyls will be added to the Digital library.