PSNC Digital Libraries Team

Since the 25th of February on the Europeana website the new version of Europeana metadata schema is available. The newest version is marked as 3.1 and according to its creators it is stable enough, to be the basis for the development of dedicated interfaces for exposing the metadata to Europeana.

Europeana Semantic Elements ver. 3.1 specfication is available here.

News from The European Library:

The European Library today announced a new site release of www.TheEuropeanLibrary.org, a free resource to discover the extensive learning and research materials, covering all subjects, from 38 national libraries across Europe. Originally developed as a central point of access to Europe’s library material, the website now combines multilingual search functionalities with several online exhibitions and web2.0 tools.

The new portal incorporates many of the recommended enhancements from user feedback studies. Top of the list was more multilingual facilities. As a result, users can now navigate and scan over 330 collections in their native language. Support materials, including FAQs and a first-time user guide, are available in 22 European languages.

Users also enjoy the portal’s rich media offerings. The portal specialises in online exhibitions that showcase the collections of Europe’s national libraries. A new, exciting exhibition on the Napoleonic Wars has been launched to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the campaigns. More than 200 rarities were collected from the national libraries of Spain, Portugal, France, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Serbia.

In the last two days two interesting publications focused on digital libraries were published in Polish digital libraries. The first one is a shared work edited by Jadwiga Woźniak-Kasperek and Jerzy Franke titled “Digital libraries: projects, realisations, technologies (Biblioteki cyfrowe : projekty, realizacje, technologie)”. In this book you can find a chapter written by Władysław Marek Kolasa titled „dLibra” Digital Library Framework – platforma do budowy bibliotek cyfrowych, describing the dLibra software developed by the PSNC Digital Libraries Team.

The second publication is titled “Standards in the process of  digitization of cultural heritage objects (Standardy w procesie digitalizacji obiektów dziedzictwa kulturowego)” written by Grzegorz Płoszajski. This book is based on the internal report of the Technical Standards of Digitized Objects Working Team, a part of the Digitization Team appointed by the Polish Minister of Culture and  National Heritage on the 24th of April, 2006.

Both books are written in the Polish language – if you know it, we encourage you to read those books!