Digitization activities started in the National Library of the Czech Republic in the years 1992-1993 in co-operation with the Czech company whose name is today AiP Beroun.
The important milestones are:
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1992-1993 - various small projects mostly for UNESCO
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1995-1996 - building of the first digitization centre for manuscripts and old printed books
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1999 - UNESCO recommends our standards for the Memory of the World programme
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1999-2000 - beginning of digitization of microfilm
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2000 - Memoria (digitization of manuscripts and old printed books) and Kramerius (periodicals and other modern acid-paper materials) became national digitization programmes supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture
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2003 - complete document migration from the proprietary SGML standard onto XML platform
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2003-2004 - launch of two digital libraries: Manuscriptorium and Kramerius
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2006 - both digital libraries are included in TEL (The European Library)
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2007 - start-up of ENRICH (European eContentplus project) for virtual building of a European digital library of manuscripts based on our Manuscriptorium (18 full partners + many associated ones)
Manuscriptorium tends to become an international research environment mostly for manuscripts and also old rare printed documents. It has already data from several foreign institutions.
Mostly for its activity in the field of digital access to rare collections, the National Library of the Czech Republic was awarded the UNESCO Jikji prize in 2005.
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Short video from the Award Ceremony in Cheongju, Republic of Korea
Webmaster: Adolf Knoll
