German Digital Library starts work
Press release from 12/02/2010
On 30 November 2010, the Board of Trustees and the General Assembly of the German Digital Library (DDB) Competence Network were constituted in Berlin.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and newly elected spokesman of the board of the competence network coordinating the work of the DDB, says: "The German Digital Library will decisively advance the digital networking of cultural and scientific institutions in Germany and thus open up completely new opportunities for the public to use the range of digital data from culture and science. I am delighted that a further decisive step has now been taken towards realising this project."
With the DDB, the available digital offerings of over 30,000 cultural and scientific institutions will be networked in several stages and made accessible to the public via a joint national portal. This will include digital copies of works of all kinds (books, images, archival records, sheet music, music, films, 3D images of sculptures and cultural monuments) from libraries, archives, museums and scientific institutes. The service will also be integrated into EUROPEANA (European Digital Library).
Once the basic functionalities of the DDB have been developed and set up, state-of-the-art knowledge management tools will be used to search for and find digital objects, such as those being developed as part of the 200 million euro Theseus research project under the responsibility of the Federal Minister of Economics and Technology. Semantic searches both in texts and in multimedia content such as images and film sequences are to be made possible, as are virtual museum tours or 3D views of a sculpture or cultural monument. Above all, it will be possible to link content from different thematically related institutions at the click of a mouse.
The German Digital Library is a joint project of the federal government, the federal states and local authorities, whose funding of 2.6 million euros per year from 2011 was approved by the Conference of Minister Presidents and the Federal Cabinet on 2 December 2009 and sealed in an administrative agreement between the federal government and the federal states. Now that the DDB Competence Network has formally begun its work and the budget for 2011 has been approved, the conditions are in place for the DDB portal to begin pilot operations at the end of 2011.
The bodies of the Competence Network are the General Assembly, the Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees. The office of the DDB Competence Network will be set up at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
Members of the competence network currently include 13 cultural and scientific institutions from federal, state and local authorities: the Bavarian State Library, the Baden-Württemberg Library Service Centre, the Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and the State Archaeological Museum, the Federal Archives, the German Film Institute, the German National Library, the Baden-Württemberg State Archives, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Göttingen State and University Library of Lower Saxony, the Saxon State Library - Dresden State and University Library, the Hamburg Historical Museums Foundation, the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
The members of the Board of Directors were elected by the General Assembly on 30 November 2010: Professor Dr Dr h.c. mult. Hermann Parzinger (also Spokesman of the Board), Dr Rolf Griebel, Director General of the Bavarian State Library and Heinz Baumann, Vice President of the State Archives, Baden-Württemberg. The following were elected as deputies to the members of the Executive Board: Dr Klaus Ceynova, Deputy Director General of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Dr Gerald Maier, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg and Norbert Zimmermann, Vice President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
The DDB Board of Trustees consists of four members appointed by the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the federal states and four members appointed by the Federal Government. The Federal Association of Local Authorities delegates a representative of the Association of German Cities. Elke Harjes-Ecker, Head of the Department of Culture at the Thuringian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, was elected Chair of the Board of Trustees. The Deputy Chair of the Board of Trustees is Matthias Harbort, Head of Division at the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Since the beginning of 2010, the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in St. Augustin has been responsible for setting up the central infrastructure as part of a time-limited project funded by the federal government in 2010/2011. Following a selection procedure on 24 June 2010, the operational management was transferred to the Fachinformationszentrum (FIZ) Karlsruhe, a non-profit limited company of the federal and state governments, which already performs similar tasks in the field of science.
Further information is available on the Internet.