Presentation of Croatian digital heritage in Europeana and 2011 Online NUL catalogue of the most important accessions
Today a great achievement was presented at the National and University Library in Zagreb: Croatian digital heritage has become part of the largest European cultural heritage collection – the European digital library, Europeana.
Director General of the National and University Library in Zagreb Dunja Seiter-Šverko talked about this notable achievement to everyone present at the occasion, pointing out that Croatia does not have to wait until 2013 to become part of Europe. Namely, the works from our rich cultural heritage are now available to European readers, who are now able to get acquainted with Croatian cultural legacy.
Europeana has been developing since 2008 on the initiative and with the support of the European Commission and its principal aim is to collect and integrate European cultural heritage in the digital environment. It is a multilingual portal providing unique access to digital and digitized materials from various European institutions, and apart from libraries, it includes museums, archives, and other holders of digital cultural heritage.
The National and University Library in Zagreb delivered to Europeana the bibliographic records (metadata) on two collections of digital and digitized materials. One is the Digital Academic Repository (DAR), a collection of doctoral dissertations and master’s theses which includes the oldest digitized dissertations as well as contemporary digital-born theses defended at the University of Zagreb and the other is the Croatian Web Archive (Hrvatski arhiv weba – HAW), a collection of the selected materials harvested from the Internet and archived at the archival system of the National and University Library in Zagreb. Director General Dunja Seiter-Šverko emphasized that the inclusion of DAR in Europeana placed the Croatian scientific community within the framework of European science, while the inclusion of materials and content harvested by HAW brought diversity to the overall contents of Europeana since the Croatian Web Archive is the first such archive on Europeana.
Dunja Seiter-Šverko also presented the 2011 Online catalogue of the most important accessions, a publication bringing the most significant and valuable works that the National and University Library in Zagreb acquired during the last year. Except that this is the first time that the most important accessions have been presented to the public through the electronic edition, the fact that the Library for the first time published its e-publication in the ePub format is also a novelty. The ePub format has become a standard in e-book publishing and it will also become a standard for e-publications published by the National and University Library in Zagreb in the near future.
