Director General of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin to the Executive Council of the World Digital Library (WDL)
Press release from 06/25/2010
On Wednesday, representatives of the 91 institutions currently participating in the World Digital Library (WDL) elected their Executive Council in Washington. Barbara Schneider-Kempf, Director General of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, is one of the seven members who will in future define the guidelines of the WDL as a steering committee.
The WDL is an internet portal supported by UNESCO. It presents the world's top written heritage as high-quality digital copies. The website, which is available in UNESCO's seven working languages, pursues the organisation's educational mission: it aims to promote intercultural understanding and, above all, make the outstanding documents of humanity's cultural heritage accessible to the general public. Technically, the WDL is hosted by the Library of Congress.
"The World Digital Library is a wonderful opportunity for the Staatsbiblio-thek zu Berlin, Germany's largest academic universal library, to present its most important treasures worldwide," emphasises Barbara Schneider-Kempf. Until now, only the Bavarian State Library has been represented in the WDL from Germany, which has been online since 2009.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, added: "As you can see from the example of the WDL, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation regularly plays a special role in networks and in the provision of cultural heritage in digital reference portals due to its outstanding holdings, interdisciplinary structure and national significance."
In order to ensure that the originals held by museums, libraries and archives can continue to be optimally utilised in the future, their collections must be comprehensively digitised. To this end, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is currently developing a digitisation strategy. The SPK is already participating in projects such as the German Digital Library and Europeana. The digitisation and worldwide free publication of library holdings is a long-term project with top priority at the Berlin State Library, where 14 employees currently work in the library's digitisation centre; the equipment pool will be expanded to 14 scanners (2 scanning robots, 10 desktop scanners and 2 Graz book tables) in 2010. If the number of employees continues to grow, it will be possible to scan over 20,000 pages per day in future, i.e. 4 million pages per year.
The Berlin State Library will initially make the following documents from its holdings available successively:
Nibelungenlied und Klage ("Hundshagensche Handschrift"), 1440
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Wer bin ich? (autograph of the poem)
Gutenberg Bible (between 1452 and 1454)
Handwritten drawing by Alexander von Humboldt with letter: Cacajao monkey
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Magic Flute (autograph)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio (autograph)
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor op. 125 (autograph)
"Hamilton-Siddur" / Passover Haggadah, 13th century
95 Martin Luther's Theses, 1517
Heinrich Hoffmann: Der Struwwelpeter
Wilhelm Busch: Max and Moritz
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