The director of the National Library of Spain discussed the past, present, and future of libraries and books. Libraries are transitioning from physical paper collections to digital formats accessible online. National libraries are digitizing collections and making them available through partnerships and platforms. The future of the book is moving from physical containers to online multimedia content. National libraries must adapt to changing user needs and technologies while maintaining core functions like legal deposit and preserving cultural heritage.
Philosophy of Education and Educational Philosophy
Imagine Libraries...: beyond a future that is already here. Glòria Pérez- Salmerón
1. THE CULTURE OF THE BOOK
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUMMIT OF THE BOOK
The Library of Congress. Washington D.C.
December 6-7, 2012
National Library perspectives on the Past, Present and Future of the book
IMAGINE LIBRARIES…
Beyond a future that is already here
Glòria Pérez-Salmerón
Director of the National Library of Spain
10. Its catalogue is
increasingly ubiquitous
The European Library, TEL
Online Computer Libraries Center, OCLC
Manuscripts in REBIUN (Red de Bibliotecas
Universitarias)
Authorities in VIAF (Virtual International
Authorities File)
11. Core functions
Digital legal deposit and Web Archive
National repository project
In collaboration with Red.es (ITC Cº infrastructure) and
the Spanish Autonomous Governments , CCAA
Web Archive
3 mass harvesting + 3 complementary mass harvesting
2 selective harvesting
85 TB
1,700 + millions of URLs
12. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica
Public-private partnership with Telefónica:
Digitization of 30,000 pages/day
Nowadays there are around 100,000 titles available
in Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, including 1,066 titles
of serials collection in Hemeroteca Digital
Around 23,000,000 pages
13. International digital cooperation
The European Library /Europeana
World Digital Library
OCLC, participation in WorldCat and CONTENTdm
(work in progress)
Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano
(BDPI)
15. BDPI: A success story
It was born in October 2012 under the
auspices of the Association of Ibero-American
National Libraries, ABINIA
Access to digitized works
Dublin Core metadata
16. Participating libraries BDPI
National Library of Brazil
National Library of Chile
National Library of Colombia
National Library of Panama
National Library of Portugal
National Library of Spain
157.207 titles
18. • Facebook: 126,000 + followers
• Twitter followers :
• Library 12,700 +
• Museum 2,800 +
• Director 1,100 +
• Youtube: 138 videos and + 440,000 reproductions
• Flickr: 233,425 visits in 2012
• Wikipedia: improvement of the BNE contents
• Slideshare: 90 presentations
• RSS: blog, news, events and exhibitions
19. Interactive online books
Universal access to our masterpieces with rich
added contextual value:
Original and transliterated text
Music, maps, games, quizzes, videos, 3D
models, ephemera, engraves, drawings
Quijote Interactivo , October 2010 (2,300,000
consultations in 2011)
Leonardo Interactivo, October 2012
22. Austerity’s strategies
Society is requiring more and better services
from libraries
Monitor actions to achieve our goals with
limited resources
The key lies in cooperation (Public-private
partnerships, PPPs) and in an exquisite
management of resources
Do more with less!
23. Libraries recover their old roles
in a society that needs to turn
information into knowledge
24. The future of the book
From
The book as a physical container of information
to
“The book as a … “
Thanks to the LoC to invite the BNE at THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUMMIT OF THE BOOK Is a real pleasure to be here with all of you My presentation is talking about Imagine libraries...: beyond THE future that is already here
Libraries have always coexisted with changes. They have adapted to social and cultural evolution and they have become more relevant for citizens. Since the end of the 20th century there has been a change of perspective, an important variation in the approach towards both the content and services available to users.
Libraries are institutions in which history weights heavily. Over the centuries they have evolved almost beyond recognition: from serving monastic orders, the nobility and the Crown, to serving the people, upon the explosion of the social role of libraries in the 19th century and the special consideration of the type of users they served. It can be said that libraries have gone from accommodating only monks, aristocrats and kings to end up being considered as a fundamental service to citizens, with a direct impact on their education.
This service to citizens is diversified according to the typology of these libraries, they are divided into public, specialized or national, depending on the user type and its aims or objectives. Public libraries are a first-class educational instrument which also encompass cultural entertainment among their functions . Specialized libraries focus on information that fosters research, whether it be scientific or humanistic. Finally, national libraries prioritize the preservation of cultural heritage, understood as the guarantee of its permanent dissemination.
All that is changing:
From 2000, this entire situation begins to vary due to a change of perspective: from works on paper ...
to the birth of digital or digitized ones, i.e. Works visible on a screen. This produces a change in the established order that many authors have considered similar to that which occurred with the invention of the printing press.
There are new players in the arena like Google Books or Wikipedia, but this has been only the beginning of a big change. L ibraries are immersed in a crisis of identity and the risk is that they can lose sight of their main objectives, which are primarily to organize information, to disseminate it and to preserve it for posterity. In these times of uncertainty national libraries are also at a crossroads, struggling with false contradictions between diffusion and preservation, forgetting the fact that preservation makes permanent dissemination possible and that conservation without diffusion has not any sense .
The National Library of Spain which has celebrated its three hundred anniversary this year, faces the future with very clear ideas and a firm commitment to the dissemination of its collections and tasks, starting with its main objective, which is: to document its collections by means of the Catalog.
The library catalog encompasses most of the materials that the Library stores: from manuscripts and books from the 14th to the 19th century to photos, musical scores and videos, maps, drawings, engravings, serials and sound recordings. The catalogue’s national or international dissemination seeks to increasingly expand presence all over the world. It has been available in The European Library (TEL) since 2007 and in the Online Computer Libraries Center (OCLC) since 2009. National authority records have been in the Virtual International Authorities File since 2009. We have begun the SKOSification of our physical copies of authority records which were incorporated into HIVE in 2011. Alongside this our manuscripts are in the Spanish university libraries network (REBIUN), and we collaborate with autonomous regions and universities sharing data from our catalog.
Among its main functions it is important to mention the management of the legal deposit whose corresponding law was updated in 2011 and whose main challenge has been the deposit of digital online publications. Right now the project for the creation of a national repository in cooperation with the State Body Red.es and the different regions is already underway. That repository will not only host the digital legal deposit but also the Internet Archive and the collection digitized by the library. It will represent the embryo of future additional services The BNE has been collecting the “.es” domain since 2009 and three massive collections have already been created. We have also completed two selective web harvestings, one on the last General Election (November 20th 2011) and the other one collecting Spanish resources in the fields of the humanities that collected around 4.000 URLS. In total the BNE currently has 85 Terabytes with 1,7 billion URLS.
In addition, our digital library already has around 100,000 titles Due to the sponsorship of Telefónica , Spanish telecom Company, which is a Public-private partnership that has now become an international reference point thanks to the remarkable impact it has had on the Library. Thanks to this sponsorship 30.000 pages per day are scanned at the headquarters of the BNE, including sound recordings , that are made available to our users via streaming. One of the most important features of this sponsorship is that these digital images are now the property of the Library without further restriction of use than those dictated by the intellectual property law.
Our digital library, the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica or BDH is already present in other international digital libraries such as Europeana or the World Digital Library. At present our digitized works are being incorporated into CONTENTdm, the OCLC digital library. In September of 2012 the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano (BDPI) was created, under the auspices of the Association of Latino-American national libraries, ABINIA. This project provides a common access point to the digital resources of the Ibero and American national libraries.
Digital Library of the Latin-American Heritage The biblioteca Digital del patrimonio iberoamericano (BDPI) the digital Libary of the Spanish and Portuguese latino-american heritage
The BDPI has been a success story because in a very short space of time it has succeeded in providing access to around 160,000 titles, covering all types of materials, including sound recordings, of six Latin American national libraries:
Close to one hundred and sixty thousand titles of The National Library of Brazil The National Library of Chile The National Library of Colombia The National Library of Panamá The National Library of Portugal The National Library of Spain
The Portal, designed and developed by the BNE, allows the user to perform searches in the main fields of the bibliographic records from the library catalogues and also in the text of the documents. It is also possible to filter the results obtained through the selection of multiple facets. It also offers different collections or selections of documents which deserve a prominent place for their relevance, interest or importance, qualitatively or quantitatively, in the record set of the BDPI. They represent a new approach, cross-cutting and inclusive, towards the digital resources of Ibero-American heritage.
Fully aware of the great works that it is home to, the BNE has promoted a host of new useful social tools to disseminate its collections in different areas. Firstly, the Library opened its Facebook page in November 2008. It soon became a meeting point for the BNE's numerous remote users, who have a generalist profile . The main objective is to disseminate our lesser-known collections in an eye-catching way. In May 2011 we reached 100,000 followers and we are currently approaching 130,000. We are also actives in Twitter . In August of 2011 Twitter account of the BNE was created and the Director of the Library as well. We present a more professional content trying to promote the BNE’s cultural activities. At present there are nearly 13.000 followers and a new account has been created for the Museum. The success of this page led to the launch of the YouTube channel in April 2009. Today it contains around 150 videos played more than 440,000 times. A month later, in May 2009, the BNE website started up a blog which approaches the collections, projects and history of the institution in a fun, entertaining way. In March 2011 a channel on Flickr Washington created to disseminate graphic collections, among others, photography, which contains true works of art and explores all media and techniques. So far this year this channel has received around 250,000 visitors. During this year, the BNE has improved its information on the Wikipedia website, thanks to a cooperative writing project between librarians, active or retired, of the institution. In addition to this, the possibility of using the authorities of the BNE as a source of standardizing personal names Is being considered. This page is especially important as The European Library portal links up with it, as a basic source.
We take advantage of the new technologies to enrich and disseminate our masterpieces. These are initiatives that aim to bring the bibliographical jewels of the library to the general public include interactive books. They were inaugurated with the publication of the Quijote interactive in October 2010. Interactive books have been supported by the sponsorship of Telefónica and they endow the works with a temporal and intellectual context that relies on both the digitized holdings of the library and the profound knowledge of the professionals at the institution. The user experience is enriched with multimedia content that allows a full and innovative approach. So far, over 2.300.000 visits to this site have been recorded. The second interactive book was selected by the Facebook followers of the BNE among a group of four works. It was released in October 2012 after a long process of evolution. The Madrid Codex I and II of Leonardo da Vinci contain annotations and drawings corresponding to the different periods and contents. As is the case with most of Leonardo’s texts, themes are alternated and mixed in an arbitrary manner, following the line of thought of a genius who reacted with curiosity towards all aspects of nature. This peculiarity has led us to include a subject index which group together the pages containing information about a specific topic, such as music, painting and civil engineering, and allows direct, precise contact with the subject matter that is of interest to the user. The website also allows access to the digitized work, transcription and translation.
The working process has taken advantage of the restoration, digitization and re-binding of the works in which a team of professionals of the BNE has participated. Other contextual content of interest include a chronology of the life of Leonardo and a brief treatment of the areas of art and knowledge that were addressed by the universal thinker. All this has been supported through works that are part of the National Library of Spain holdings. There is also a description of Leonard’s codices that have survived to this day, the theme that addresses each one of them and the place where they can be found nowadays. Another section attempts to bring us closer to the historical, social, cultural and political context in which the extensive work of Da Vinci was created.
The current economic situation and sustainable development compel us to adopt austerity strategies, notwithstanding the fact that the global community requires an increasingly strong commitment from libraries to render more and better services. Therefore, library performance must be maximized to achieve the goals of quality and excellence with limited investments. Undoubtedly the key lies in cooperation, public-private sponsorships and outstanding resource management, in addition to a generous use of creativity and imagination. But currently the Spanish law needs to be adapted in order to make sponsorship attractive to the private sector. We hope to have it in the next year. In summary, our strategy is to do more with less !
It’s no longer a fantasy to think about libraries without walls, without reading rooms, despite the beauty of these rooms; it is no longer a dream to think of libraries without opening hours, without boundaries or limitations, that provide us with training, entertainment and research resources online. In this way, libraries would recover their role in a society that ,now more than ever, needs to change information into knowledge.
The printed book, as we have known it until nowadays, is a physical container and conveyor of information. The role of the libraries has been to preserve this containers and make them accessible to the people to disseminate this information and the related knowledge. But the times have started to change with the introduction and universal availability of the new information technologies. More and more people uses mobile devices giving them permanent access to rich multimedia content. And the ‘change rate’ accelerates in an exponential way.
For instance last week I downloaded in my iPad this App of Ferran Adrià. This substitutes with advantage the classical printed cookbook that has been used for centuries. There is not way back!!! Everybody knows that next January there will not be anymore a printed version of the Newsweek magazine. Newsweek is going digital in January 2013.
Our vision is that the classical printed book will be in the future used mostly as an art object container or something alike. This has been the idea behind the last large exhibition of our Tercenterary at the BNE: “The book as a … “ where we are showing very special books with very special subjects like:
The book as a precious art object
The book as a hunter of moments
The book as a visual poetry
The book as a delicacy
The book a desire
The book as a wound
The book as music
Or, the book as a journey This is contents that people will never be able to experience through an electronic device.
In conclusion: We are moving from the massive edition of printed books in paper which are, as I said, a physical container of information to Two new formats: Most of the information will come from online multimedia updatable contents. And, the physically printed format will be a privilege reserved to very specific contents that is durable along the centuries
So, - What must we change in order to accomplish our mission? - Is still our mission to preserve and disseminate contents like this cookbook launched as an iPad application? How do we do it? For instance, must we buy every available APP? If yes, how do we grant access to the users ... And so on?
We have a very, very interesting but challenging time ahead of us!