Turkey’s National Library to digitize cultural heritage

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

The archive of National Library Presidency will be shared via digital channels with the European Digital Library, The library will be sharing 400,000 pages of its newspaper script archive. Hürriyet photo

Turkey’s Culture Ministry is set to share the National Library Presidency archive via digital channels with the European Digital Library National Library Presidency, as part of the “Europeana Newspapers Project.” As part of the move, the library will be sharing 400,000 pages of its newspaper archive.

The project information meeting will take place on May 3 and the presidency will be hosting the meeting, which will welcome international representatives. Later on, the panelists will be evaluating the experiences of Turkey’s ongoing EU projects and digitizing cultural heritage. The meeting will be divided into different parts. The “Numbering & OCR” panel will be directed by Nazan Özenç Uçak, of Hacettepe University.

The overall project, which is being joined by Germany, France, Netherlands, Estonia, Austria, Finland, Poland, England, Turkey, Serbia, Italy and Latvia - will be continuing until 2014 and it is directed by the Berlin State Library.

The aim of the project

The aim is to make Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage available through a cross-domain portal (Europeana.eu) and to work with museums, archives, audiovisual archives and libraries to deliver the portal and make it sustainable. The target of the project is to bring items that have already been digitized into the portal and also to encourage and support the digitization of more of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.

The priority of the project is to share the experiences about European Union strategies up to now. The European Union Newspaper Project is one of the sub-projects of the European Union Competitiveness and Innovation Environment Program, which is made possible with the support of the Digital Agenda for Europe initiative. The aim is to support cultural heritage through digital channels.

Making the collections held by Europe’s libraries, archives, museums and audiovisual archives available online is a win-win for culture, economic growth and individual fulfillment.

Digitizing Europe’s cultural heritage, making it accessible online and preserving it for future generations is one of the challenges of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The objective is thus to make the collections held by Europe’s libraries, museums, galleries and archives and audiovisual archives available online – vast numbers of books, paintings, museum objects, archival records, periodicals and millions of hours of film and video covering the whole of Europe’s rich diverse history and culture.

As single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage, Europeana provides access to culture for all, including for education, work and leisure, and serves as a hub for the creative industries and innovative re-use of cultural material. With the help of ICT, Europeana thus turns Europe’s cultural heritage into a lasting asset for citizens and the economy.