A National Library for the 21st century knowledge and cultural heritage online

Transcription

1 Article A National Library for the 21st century knowledge and cultural heritage online Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 2016, Vol. 26(1) 5 14 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: /ALX.0037 ala.sagepub.com Roger Jøsevold National Library of Norway, Norway Abstract Since 2004, the National Library of Norway has worked systematically to develop a digital National Library. The core of this activity has been to digitize the whole collection and to seek ways to disseminate the digital content to the biggest possible audience. Being a true multimedia library, the collection holds published material in a wide spectrum of media: from traditional printed material to radio, TV, audio, film and music. The library also harvests the Norwegian internet domain.no. Today the digital library contains 2.8 million digital objects, which adds up to 4000 TB of unique digital content. By use of extended collective licensing everyone with a Norwegian IP address can freely access and read all books published in Norway up to In addition, through agreements with the major Norwegian newspapers, all Norwegian libraries can offer access to complete digital historical newspaper collections. The most important matter to make this happen has been a strategic partnership and cooperation with rights holders and publishers. This partnership has built trust and confidence and has resulted in a cooperation where knowledge and costs are shared. The National Library of Norway offers digital library services that provide online access to full-text versions of all books published in Norway up until the year 2001, access to digital newspaper collections from the major national and regional newspapers in all libraries in the country, and opportunities for everyone with internet access to search and listen to more than 40,000 radio programmes recorded between 1933 and the present day. The foundation for this development was laid in 2004 when the National Library adopted a digitization strategy for the creation of a National Library for the 21st century. This was later followed up by the decision in principle in 2006 to digitize the entire collection. Corresponding author: Roger Jøsevold, National Library of Norway, 2674 Solli, 0203 Oslo, Norway. roger.josevold@nb.no

2 6 Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 26(1) Keywords National Library of Norway, digital libraries, digitization strategy, cultural heritage, legal deposit Background In 1989, Norway was one of the first countries in the world to pass a media-neutral Legal Deposit Act, which also encompassed EDB (electronic) documents, at that time mostly stored on CD-ROMs. The new law, which extended legal deposit to new media areas, was followed by the decision to establish a branch of the National Library in the industrial town of Mo i Rana. This was quite a surprise, bearing in mind that Mo i Rana is some 1000 km from Oslo and has no academic institutions, and that the National Library had not yet been established as an institution with a responsible national librarian. Until that date, the Norwegian version of legal deposit had been the responsibility of the Norwegian department of the University of Oslo Library. The decision was inspired by the British Library s branch in Boston Spa, and was influenced by the closure of the state-owned Norwegian steel industry in Mo i Rana. Young and newly qualified employees, many without previous library experience, were recruited to help staff the new branch. Furthermore, thanks to the development of an ICT resource pool that was quick to identify the potential and ramifications of the incipient internet revolution, the first version of the National Library website, nb.no, was launched in 1993 one of the first registrations in the Norwegian.no domain. The first digital content to be made available was photographic material, primarily postcard collections and photographic archives. In the late 1990s, the National Library and the national broadcaster, NRK, developed a partnership for the digitization and long-term preservation of the Norwegian historic radio archive. This was the start of a collaboration that is constantly being expanded, and represented the kernel of an understanding of and an expertise in the digital field that some years later facilitated the launch of a comprehensive digitization strategy. A digital National Library In 2004, the National Library of Norway revised its strategy, for the first time explicitly including the ambition of developing a digital National Library. At that time, many of the digitization projects in the libraries related to the digitization of out-of-copyright works, with an emphasis on rare collections or selections of books, where the main objective was to present treasures from the collection that it had not hitherto been possible to display to a wider public. In comparison with the concept of the digital library as an up-to-date and relevant digital public information source, these initiatives were more like curated digital exhibitions. The first initiative that was intended to create a proper digital library was the Google Books project, whose stated ambition was nothing less than to digitize all the books in the world. Google Books proved to be an inspiration for the National Library, and in 2006 the digital strategy was expanded: the masterplan was to digitize the entire collection. This ambition received support from the Ministry of Culture and was later

3 Jøsevold 7 affirmed by two white papers to the Storting (the Norwegian parliament) in 2009, one on the subject of libraries and the other about the digitization of Norway s cultural heritage. The National Library s role and responsibility were confirmed in both reports. Parallel with these strategy processes, arrangements were started to enable the work to be done by redeploying personnel within the organization to the new tasks and by developing expertise in mass digitization. Here, the main focus is to digitize as much content as possible as cheaply as possible, while fulfilling quality requirements to preserve the digitized material for at least a millennium. The first change was to end the microfilming of newspapers, and redeploy the personnel concerned to the digitization of printed material. From modest beginnings and around 15 members of staff, the operations have now mushroomed into a veritable digitization factory, with about 100 employees, about 70 of whom are full time. In addition, some digitization services have been purchased externally, primarily for the digitization of microfilmed newspaper pages. The digital growth from this operation and from the increase in material that is now received in digital form represents about 1000 TB per year, and the digital repository currently has a total capacity of around 12,000 TB. Permission to digitize the collection is laid down in the provisions of the Norwegian Copyright Act, which permits the National Library to digitize its own collections for preservation purposes. Since the decision was taken in 2006 to digitize the entire collection, a number of production lines have been systematically established in order to automatically, semi-automatically or manually scan books and newspapers in many formats. Additionally, digitizing lines have also been established for scanning manuscripts, film, sound, photographs and posters. In total, the National Library s digitization activities now consist of 34 scanners for printed material and 19 scanners for sound, film and other audiovisual material. Scanning generally takes place during normal working hours, although in some areas there are two shifts working. Digital content and digital services In parallel with the upscaling of the digitization work, a project was also started working with rights holders on possible agreements to permit content to be made available on the internet, rather than solely on National Library premises. In 2007, the first online digital library containing copyright-protected material was launched. It was limited to the topic of The Arctic, and included books, periodicals and other related material. The agreement that made this public access possible was a licence agreement with the rights organization LINO, which, until its merger with Kopinor in 2009, was responsible for the rights of the Norwegian Critics Association and the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association. This agreement regulated the number of titles, the timeframe for the agreement and the financial compensation to be paid for the access. Evaluations of this initiative revealed both that there was interest in reading books online and that the parties involved were satisfied with developments to date. During this process, the ambition arose to create a general literature portal, where all literature published in Norway could be found and read in its entirety. On the initiative of the then national librarian, the Ministry of Culture appointed a small working group to examine opportunities to create such a portal by means

4 8 Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 26(1) of an agreement between the National Library and the rights holders. The working group was chaired by a former secretary at the Ministry of Culture and included the national librarian and the director of Kopinor. The working group recommended the use of the extended collective licence agreement model, under which Kopinor, on behalf of the rights holders, can enter into an agreement with the National Library, which for its part undertook to pay compensation for the use of the copyright-protected works. Bokhylla.no In 2009, Kopinor and the National Library entered into a time-limited agreement permitting access to a selection of literature published in Norway specifically, all books published during the last decade of each of the last four centuries. The vast majority of this copyrighted literature was published between 1990 and 1999, but the 1890s were also well represented. All in all, it was calculated that the copyrighted material would amount to approximately 50,000 titles. The payment model involved the payment of compensation per page per year. The trial period was set to two years (which in the event became three years), and the parties agreed to evaluate the use of the service and any possible effects of the service on book sales and library borrowings. Would the opportunity to read material free of charge online mean that people would buy fewer books or stop borrowing books from libraries? The evaluation showed that the service was used, that use of the service increased strongly during the trial period, and that the number of users steadily increased throughout the trial period. It also showed a concentration of users around the four traditional university cities and that a majority of the users were in higher education or worked in the academic sector. Further details are given in the section Users and usage. In autumn 2012, the parties to the agreement agreed to make it permanent, and following negotiations the range of books was expanded to include all books published in Norway up to the end of the year Minor adjustments were made to the price model. The present agreement runs until Digitization of all of the books from the relevant time period is expected to be completed during By then the project will have digitized about 250,000 titles, representing all copyrighted books published between 1659 and The expanded collective licence agreement is a legal model found in the Nordic countries that facilitates rights clearance without tracking individual users. It gives Kopinor the right to enter into binding agreements on behalf of its members, non-members and foreign rights holders. The distribution of the compensation for the use of the works is a process that is conducted internally within Kopinor; the various rights holders and publishers must jointly agree a distribution model. As party to the contract and as payer of the compensation the National Library is as a matter of principle not party to these negotiations. The public has gradually come to regard Bokhylla as a natural information portal, and use of the service has increased greatly over time. Compared with 2.7 million page views during the first month in 2009, in January 2015 more than 74 million book pages were viewed, and the service is linked to from many other websites and is often cited as a reference. From the trial period onwards, the Bokhylla project has been financed from the National Library s budget. The National Library covers the costs of digitization and the

5 Jøsevold 9 expense of compensating the rights holders for online access. Experience so far indicates that an average book has about 170 pages. The National Library s costs for digitizing a book of that size and converting it to text by OCR are NOK (about EUR 29-35). The costs of making such a book available are approximately NOK 60 (EUR 7) per year. In total, the costs of providing open online access to all books published in Norway up until the year 2000 are less than NOK 3 (EUR 0.34) per year per citizen. Newspapers online In spring 2007, the National Library contacted Norway s biggest-selling newspaper, Aftenposten, to look into the possibilities for a joint venture into digitization. The objective was to establish a partnership to digitize the historic newspaper collection and open it to the wider public, and in addition receive the digital print files alongside the paper copies. The dialogue resulted in a collaboration model under which the entire historic newspaper archive would be digitized and the costs shared equally between the newspaper and the National Library, along with an agreement ensuring that the National Library would receive the digital print files in addition to the paper copies so that there would be no need for future digitization. Furthermore, the National Library would be able to provide free access to the entire historic newspaper archive in all Norwegian libraries. This model became a template for further approaches to other newspapers and has proved extremely successful. At the time of writing, agreements have been entered into with 25 newspapers, including many of the major national newspapers and a selection of leading regional newspapers. An interesting detail of the digital newspaper service is that the access agreement covers the entire archive, and only the last week s issues are excluded from the service. At present the newspaper service provides access to a total of 860,000 newspaper editions. All of the digitized newspaper material is converted using OCR so that it is possible to search throughout the text. A text search will provide hits in all content, including news articles, adverts, features, obituaries and so on. It is also possible to sort by year and limit the search to individual editions. Based on our view of the potential use of this material, the newspaper service has attracted a surprisingly low number of users compared to Bokhylla.no (Digital Books Library). We have not yet carried out any studies to explain this, but there are a number of conceivable causes, among which the fact that access to the service is limited to libraries is the most obvious. Another possible cause may be the strongly regional nature of newspapers in Norway, and that the country as a whole is not yet sufficiently covered in terms of the number of newspapers for the content to have reached critical mass. The user interface may be a third limiting factor. And of course lack of knowledge of the service may be a fourth reason. Ensuring that the full potential of this material is utilized will be an important task going forward. Radio archive As previously mentioned, the digitization of NRK s radio archive represented the start of the National Library s accumulation of digitization expertise and digital infrastructure.

6 10 Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 26(1) From a modest start in the late 1990s, the digital radio archive now comprises 1.3 million programmes from the entire history of NRK, from 1933 to the present day. The cooperation between the National Library and NRK has been very close right from the start, with the two institutions taking each step together. One result of this close partnership was the decision 15 years ago to establish a joint digital archive. The practical upshot of this is that when a member of NRK s staff makes a routine search in the digital radio archive, and when a user in the National Library s reading rooms in Oslo searches for content, both are searching in the same digital repository inside the mountain in Mo i Rana. Rights management is a complex issue in broadcasting. Consequently, only around 40,000 programmes are currently freely available online. NRK owns all the rights to these programmes, primarily news, sport and other current-affairs programming. The language bank In 2010 the National Library was asked to take on the responsibility of developing a Norwegian language bank. The language bank is a collection of digital language resources and a national infrastructure for language technology and research. The assignment involves collecting, developing, facilitating and making available language resources and language tools. The service is primarily aimed at language researchers, language students and enterprises that develop language technology products. The service is also part of linguistic policy and is intended to serve as a resource to preserve application areas for the Norwegian language. The language bank s services are offered free of charge online and resources can be downloaded easily. It is also possible to use the National Library s N-gram search function for quantitative text analysis. nb.no The National Library of Norway wasted no time in registering a Norwegian.no domain name, and was one of a group of eight national libraries that initiated collaboration through the IIPC to develop technology and methodology for web harvesting. Harvesting started early in the new millennium, and has continued until the present day under the authority of the Norwegian Legal Deposit Act of In recent years the Norwegian Data Protection Authority has imposed a number of restrictions on such harvesting, which in practical terms has made open and widespread harvesting impossible, partly by stipulating that websites must be contacted before harvesting can commence. As such legislation has so far been formulated and interpreted; the legal conflict between the cultural inheritance perspective and personal data protection interests has not been precisely clarified. However, these matters have been clarified by the new Legal Deposit Act adopted by the Storting in June One of the consequences is that it will once again be possible to carry out much wider harvesting, while personal privacy interests will be addressed through restrictions in access and use of the harvested content, and regulations that allow

7 Jøsevold 11 individuals to add comments and also in some cases to have information concerning themselves deleted. The latter will be achieved through a dedicated committee which will ultimately rule on these issues. Other resources and services In addition to the main areas described above, other digital content is offered in media such as film, photography and manuscripts. Bibliographic portals have been prepared for several major authors. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Norwegian Constitution in 2014, a website was developed under the name Statsmaktene ( Government ). The site offers a range of digital documents in the form of Official Norwegian Reports, Reports to the Storting and other public documents. However, the core of the service is a complete searchable digital version of the stenographic records of all the Norwegian parliamentary debates from 1814 until the present day a total of some 3 million pages. The service can be accessed in many ways, including through full-text searches. Users and usage Since the start of the trial period for Bokhylla in 2009, monthly statistics have been kept concerning use of the Digital Library, based on log files. Not surprisingly, usage has increased dramatically over this six-year period. The total number of users has expanded considerably over the last five years, from 60,000 visits per month to more than 180,000. During the same period, actual visits to the National Library have remained constant at around 180,000 per year. In line with the general increase in popularity of online books, use of Bokhylla has risen from 55,000 visits a month to around 170,000. A user survey from 2013 revealed that Bokhylla is also by far the most-used of the Digital Library s content services. Around 80% of visitors to nb.no use one or more of the service s books. The second-most-used service was the newspaper service, with 11% of visitors to nb.no using it. Although this may at first seem surprising, a survey of usage of Bokhylla from 2012 revealed that the very same people who are major consumers of books and regular visitors to libraries are also often the main users of nb.no. The 2013 survey showed that this group, more than any other, deemed the newspaper service to be the most important. One important issue settled in the Bokhylla trial period was whether free access to online books would discourage people from purchasing books. The 2012 survey revealed two interesting findings. While 20% of respondents stated that they had purchased a book after first finding it on Bokhylla, 18% reported that they did not bother to buy a book once they had located it on Bokhylla. In other words, it would appear that these two opposing effects were cancelling each other out. A similar effect was also noted with regard to library loans; however, here there is a small majority reporting that they did not borrow a book if they had already found it on Bokhylla. Part of the reason for the changes in library borrowing habits may be that the most-searched-for genre is technical literature and that the functionality and the format offered were not particularly well suited for reading from cover to cover. In 2012, when the survey was carried out, tablets were

8 12 Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 26(1) nowhere near as popular as they are today. In light of this, it was interesting to note that as many as 15% of respondents stated that they had read a book on Bokhylla from start to finish. Findings In this section I would like to summarize some of the findings from the project to establish the Digital National Library. The findings are grouped under four different areas that have all made a key contribution to establishing the extensive Digital Library offering currently available at nb.no. The establishment of an extensive Digital Library is a dynamic and constantly evolving process that must be adapted to changing needs arising as a result of both an increase in content volume and changes in internet usage. In this context it is particularly important to understand the latter. Both well-established media and other major online organizations are finding that significant volumes of users are not accessing content via these organizations websites or portals, but via dissemination and links through social media. As far back as the 2012 user survey, 62% of respondents stated that they accessed content via links from other services. The National Library has primarily focused on boosting volumes through the extensive mass digitization programme and endeavouring to establish agreements on access with rights owners. Online dynamics, customs, trends and habits are constantly changing, but without relevant content and agreements on access we will have nothing interesting to offer. Establishing an overarching digital strategy Central to establishing the Digital National Library were two decisions taken in 2004 and 2006, respectively, to set up a Digital National Library and to digitize the entire collection. This was a clear signal to the owner, the Ministry of Culture, and to the organization, of the intended main focus area over the next few years. The strategy was last revised in 2013 but still remains the National Library s most important ongoing initiative. Gradually this vision not only gained acceptance, but also active support from the Ministry of Culture through the white paper to the Storting on Digitization of the Cultural Inheritance and the Report to the Storting on Libraries in The Ministry of Culture awarded a slight increase to the National Library s budget in order to support the digitization project. Once a controversial and much-criticized strategy in parts of the library sector, the digitization project has since gained general support and acceptance. Reorganization to free up resources In parallel with the two resolutions, work started on an internal reorganization process to release resources to channel towards establishment of the Digital Library. Specifically, a unit for microfilming was closed, whose staff then formed the core of the team that gradually assumed responsibility for digitizing all printed material. Temporary resources

9 Jøsevold 13 were also used to reinforce the digital area. Instead of requesting extra resources in advance, it was important to establish practical procedures and so clearly signal that this would not simply be an additional task to sit alongside other assignments, but a genuine reorganization, involving new working methods and key re-prioritizations. This type of strategy is more likely to be sympathetically heard by and have the desired effect on owners and makes it clear that this is not a mere trial, but a genuine focus. Establishing expertise and capacity The platform for the digital focus was housed internally in the organization in the form of the expertise that had been built up through the partnership between NRK and the National Library concerning the digitization and long-term preservation of the historical radio archive. This was expertise that was not readily available in the employment market or off the shelf, but rather expertise in each individual field and in the crossover between technology, media and materials, and metadata. A number of National Library experts also participated in various international professional and specialist networks in these and related areas. Building trust through strategic partnerships with rights holders The modern digital world offers much greater potential to spread copyrighted content in unauthorized ways. File-sharing and other forms of dissemination of restricted content online means that rights holders and rights organizations have become extra vigilant. The combination of this and the libraries open-access initiatives and deepseated reflexes to secure their users the easiest possible access to as much content as possible has helped to create a climate of some suspicion between the library sector and rights holders. Thanks to the close collaboration that was initiated with NRK and continued in the newspaper agreements, over the last two decades the National Library has fostered trust between the rights holders and the institution. Although there is no direct evidence that this played a decisive role, there is no doubt that this foundation proved important when the Bokhylla agreement was being negotiated. One key consideration in the dialogue between the National Library and Kopinor has been the fact that this is a joint cultural and linguistic policy measure that will provide citizens with simple access to Norway s combined knowledge and cultural inheritance. In addition, this close collaboration has contributed to cost-sharing and an exchange of expertise that has benefited all stakeholders. New Norwegian Legal Deposit Act the simpler route to the Digital Library As mentioned previously, in June this year the Storting adopted a new Legal Deposit Act. The new law contains provisions that will make it much easier to develop and expand the Digital Library in future. The main way this will be affected is through the provision requiring all parties who make legal deposits to deposit the original digital copy in

10 14 Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues 26(1) addition to the published format. This will be of major importance for newspapers, books and magazines. Once this arrangement has been facilitated and entered operation, it will reduce and, it is hoped, completely remove the need for future digitization of this material. The regulations of the new law, which have not yet been drawn up, will determine how the digital content will be used and made available, in addition to the more traditional documentation and research purposes on the National Library s premises. This work will start in the autumn. When this is being designed, I believe that the fact that the National Library already has a documented practice for managing regulated use of rights-protected materials and a well-established tradition of collaborating with rights owners on digitization and long-term preservation of digital content will be of great value. A solid grasp of this area will facilitate a powerful and exciting expansion of the Digital Library. Democracy and culture The Digital Library is a cultural, informational and language-policy project. It is a project that introduces history to the current societal debate, a creation and democratization project that provides everyone with easy and direct access to historical sources. In the relationship between freely available and restricted content, one of the National Library s overarching goals has been to ensure that everyone has as simple access as possible to all published material. This access will come from several sources. In a digital world it is important that rights are managed in such a way as to establish a basis for the production of content and professionally creative activities. We must find routes into the commercial market, whether these are digital through copy purchases and streaming services or traditional, while libraries must also continue to provide free access. Institutions like the National Library are primarily responsible for opening up and providing access to non-commercially interesting content. Thanks to the opportunities that have been created by digitization and use of the internet, for the first time in history it is now possible for everyone to have access to all published knowledge and cultural history. This is the raison d être of the Digital National Library of Norway. Author biography Roger Jøsevold has been deputy National Librarian at the Norwegian National Library since He came to this post from a position as director for new services at Bluegarden AS, delivering web-based HR-services. Prior to this he held positions in several governmental ministries and agencies, inter alia Statskonsult, where he worked as senior advisor and also headed the expert group for organizational development and restructuring. He studied sociology, pedagogy, public law and public administration at the University of Oslo and the University College of Bodø, and has published articles on industrial and public restructuring and regional development.