THE BOOKS WORTH OF PIXELS
Digitalna Narodna biblioteka Srbije
author: Olivera Batajić
April 2007
translation into English: Danijela Tomazović
November 2009
Digitalization project has been developing in National library of Serbia since 2003. By digitalizing books, magazines, newspapers and other material, a project of the virtual library creation started. This library could be accessed at any time and from any place. Physical space of the Library became too small long time ago, so one would wait for the entrance and a seat for a long time, and sometimes it could happen you lose your place in the reading-room. The books from the Library cannot be taken out and to home, so if you were interested in something, you needed to be persistent. It was hard to get to those older, rare books. For them, one needed special permissions, which is absolutely understandable.
In order to become as accessible as possible to its readers, the National library and the people gathered in the project joined the large network of world libraries and started digitalization of those oldest books first. The aim is to completely move physical space into, so called, virtual space, being less and less virtual, because anything from the physical world is being moved to this particular virtual world. It is the fact though that one can handle virtual world and move through it more easily. The remaining question is when will we switch these worlds attributes and when will the one we now call virtual become the real world for us.
Among the other things, this rich source can be very useful to calligraphists and typographers, in historical and aesthetic regard. Through the original books we can learn about authentic letters, or about the ideas on book shaping in particular point of history.
The National library of Serbia published the guide through Digital library on its birthday, February 28 th 2007. This guide includes everything the Library has at this point of time and presents the plans for the following period. Complete collection of digitalized documents is divided into segments:
Serbian children's digital library (a collection of 127 books in full text);
Collection of Cyrillic manuscripts (Miroslav's gospel, digital copies of chosen parts of Cyrillic manuscripts);
Collection of newspapers and magazines (daily newspaper Politika , Zenit magazine, Belgrade illustrated newspaper, Serbian illustrated newspaper, DOI Serbia – science magazines, National library of Serbia Herald, A rchaeographic supplements, Current archive of media documentation EBART, Tanjug bulletins);
Collection of cartographic materials (Atlases, Belgrade on old maps, Headquarters map of Serbia);
Collection of printed music and sound records (150 digitalized old gramophone records on 78 rpm);
Collection of photographic documents (Photographs of Belgrade by Branibor Debeljković, The visit of the king Aleksandar Obrenović to the Chilandar, Portraits of Anastas Jovanović , The visit of the king Petar Karađorđević to the Chilandar, Eminent Serbs from the XIX century, Belgrade on old picture postcards, First Balkan war, First world war);
Collection of engravings and art material (Graphics of Anastas Jovanović, Belgrade on old graphics, Seven linocuts of Mihailo S. Petrov, Graphics from Mount Athos);
Collection of posters and documentary material (Proclamations and declarations of the Serbian Royal Dynasties, Theatre posters, Old stock shares);
Collection of catalogs and bibliography (Current bibliography of Serbia, Catalogue of books in languages of Yugoslav nations: 1868-1972, Catalogue of books in languages of Yugoslav nations: 1519-1867, Serbian bibliography: 1868-1944, Current bibliography “Serbika”);
Serbian constitutions (digital copies of thirteen printed Serbian constitutions since 1835 until 2006).
All of this digitalized material can be found at Library's website in high resolution. You can go through it and read it without any compensation unless otherwise stated. All digital collections are searchable by the whole content, by title, by author, by year and the country the item was published in.
Useful links:
ICDL – International Children’s Digital Library
The European Library
Google Book Search
Million books project
European digital library project
Conference of European National Libraries
IFLA – International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
EU digital libraries