European Heritage Label Logo

The European Commission has launched a campaign for everybody who wants to participate voting the new logo of the European Heritage Label. This project aims to highlight icons of the European Union, places, monuments, landscapes etc. that symbolizes the building of the EU or the European History. Click here for more information about the Label, and the rules and prizes.

Our Town Stories, a new web of Edinburgh Libraries

Our Town Stories is one of our newer websites tracing the history of Edinburgh through images, maps and stories from the libraries’ heritage collections. You can preview the site at http://www.ourtownstories.co.uk

Our Town Stories covers the period 1700 to the present day.

Users can

• View images of Edinburgh through a map interface
• Discover how familiar places have changed through then and now images
• Read Stories of Edinburgh’s people, places and city life
• Explore historical maps tracing Edinburgh’s development since 1700

For the best experience please use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari to view this website. At work Our Town Stories is best viewed on People’s Network PC’s or on Firefox (how well the site will display will depend on your version of Firefox)

We also made a commitment to deliver on information on Edinburgh’s Women of Achievement see link http://www.ourtownstories.co.uk/story/582

Best wishes

Liz McGettigan
Head of Libraries and Information Services
The City of Edinburgh Council
0131 529 7894

Programme: Europeana Conference/VI Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas

The provisional programme for the Europeana Conference/VI Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas is already available here. More speakers will be added as they are confirmed.

The Conference, as published recently, will take place in Burgos on 9, 10 and 11 October 2012.

Europeana Conference/VI Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas

The registration for the Europeana Conference/ VI Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas to be held in Burgos, Spain, next 9th, 10th and 11th October is now open here

As we published some time ago in this post, the Directorate General for Fine Arts and Cultural Assets, Archives and Libraries of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, through the Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination, is organising the Europeana Conference / VI Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas (6th Spanish Public Libraries Congress), which will take place in Burgos (Spain) on 9, 10 and 11 October 2012 under the theme Public Libraries: Individual Memory, Global Heritage. This year the Conference will be a joint event with Europeana.

 The website for the conference is: http://en.www.mcu.es/bibliotecas/MC/2012/CongresoBP/index.html

 A draft programme will be published soon here, meanwhile here you can check the major topics that will be addressed. This year there is also a call for videos, now open for participation:

Contact address: congreso.publicas@mecd.es

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

Polish Cultural Events: 2010 Overview

The National Library organized numerous cultural events in the past year. The most noteworthy of the events organized by the National Library last year was the exhibition Chopin´s Visiting Card, which displayed the world’s largest collection of Chopin´s musical manuscripts housed in the archive of the Polish National Library. The exhibition, unveiled on September 24, 2010 by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Bogdan Zdrojewski, became an important event marking the Frédéric-Chopin Year established by the Polish Parliament. Next to the rarely shown manuscripts (including 73 music pieces), Chopin’s letters from the National Library collection were also presented. The display cases were accompanied by interactive applications accessed through touch screens and headsets, allowing visitors to explore the sights and sounds of the exhibition. The exhibit coincided with the XVI International Chopin Piano Competition and was graced with a visit from the members of the competition’s jury. www.wizytowkachopina.pl

 Another notable public event was the congress entitled “Republic of Book” put on by the National Library with the collaboration of the Ministries for Culture and Education and the office of the Prime Minister as well as numerous media and private and public institutions. The congress proclaimed a coalition for reading and libraries, acting with the motto “Reading includes…” The coalition will support the cultural competence of people and their skills for active participation in the development of their social environment.

Tomasz Makowski

Director General of the National Library of Poland

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

IV Meeting on Libraries and their Municipalities

IV Meeting on Libraries and their Municipalities

This meeting is organized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the FEMP –Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces- every two years since 2005 with the objective of consolidating the cooperation between local government and public library service.

To accomplish this goal, during the meeting, good practises developed in local libraries will be presented. They constitute the result of the cooperative work of librarians and politicians. Later, a round table will be held in which they will speak about the present and the future of this cooperation.

Each edition is dedicated to a different topic. In this fourth edition, the topic is Local Memory and it is aimed to speak about the role of libraries in the recuperation, preservation and widespread of local memory, and the importance of local libraries as agents in the process of social coherence in their municipalities.

This IV Meeting on Libraries and their Municipalities will take place next  17^th November 2011 in the Ministry of Culture Auditorium in Madrid. You can read the full program following the next URL:

http://www.mcu.es/bibliotecas/MC/2011/IVEncuentro/index.html

And here, you can see the minutes of the three previous meetings:

http://www.mcu.es/bibliotecas/CE/Cooperacion/CongJornadas/EncuentroBibMunicipio.html

Subdirectorate General for Libraries Coordination
Ministry of Culture
Spain