Adolf Knoll
National Library of the Czech Republic
Mr Knoll is the Director for Science, Research and International Co-operation at the National Library of the Czech Republic. Since 1992 he is responsible for the "Memoriae Mundi Series Bohemica", a programme of digital access to rare library materials. From 2003-2005 he was teaching digitization courses for librarians at home and abroad, mostly on behalf of the OSI Network Library Programme. From 1997-2000 he was a member of the UNESCO International Advisory Committee for the Memory of the World programme; since 1996 he is a member of its Sub-Committee on Technology. He is also member of the High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries at the European Commission. He is the author of many publications and articles; mostly on digitization. He held presentations at various international seminars and conferences. He was also the main administrator of several RTD and other projects concerning digitization and related technologies. He was the architect of success at the National Library when it was awarded the world UNESCO Jikji prize for work in preservation of and digital access to documentary heritage in 2005. For his contribution to digitization of cultural heritage, he was awarded the national prize for development of Czech culture in 2006.
Presentation: Manuscriptorium: Towards a European Digital Library of Manuscripts
_______________________________________________________________________________
Abstract: Manuscriptorium (http://www.manuscriptorium.eu) is the largest European digital library of manuscripts. Through the EU ENRICH project (http://enrich.manuscriptorium.com) it will aggregate the digital content from a number of various European institutions with the aim to provide seamless access to distributed resources. Today, Manuscriptorium offers data from more than 40 Czech cultural institutions, while more than 30 foreign institutions share or intend to share their data in it. Manuscriptorium not only harvests metadata via OAI with references to data files in remote image databanks, but it also supports the newcomers by a number of tools needed for authoring and easy contribution. It will enable the researchers to work with analytical digital objects in order to create their own documents across repositories and it will provide multilingual services. The ENRICH project is bringing also a new standard for manuscript description incl. their structural mapping: the TEI P.5 enrich.dtd that is becoming the internal Manuscriptorium format and also the exchange format for cooperation. In the end of 2009, more than five million digitized pages will be seamlessly accessible from more than 70 institutions. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Czech Republic in the period from December 2007 to November 2009.