Research activities in the fields of digital libraries were started in PSNC in 1996. Their primary aim was to develop a software for building digital libraries. This initiated the the dLibra project, which was started in 1999. In 2002 the dLibra software was used for the creation of the Digital Library of Wielkopolska. Since 2004 the Digital Libraries Team organizes the “Digital libraries” workshop. In the middle of 2007 the Digital Libraries Federation – a service integrating the network of Polish digital libraries – was started in PSNC.
Year 2008 besides of another deployments of the dLibra software, brought us the participation in two large European projects related to digital libraries: ENRICH i EuropeanaLocal. Also in this year the “Digital libraries” workshop for the first time was organised together with the “Polish Digital Libraries” conference.
In the 2009 dLibra was for the first time used outside of Poland – in Sweden and Ukraine. Besides, together with the National Museum in Warsaw the work on the software for digital museums was started. The name of the software is dMuseion. In this year the ENRICH Project was finished and the Access IT project was started. In addition during the EuropeanaLocal project information about 250 000 objects from Polish figital libraries were transferred to II „Polish Digital Libraries Conference” and VI „Digital libraries” workshop, and the number of objects available via the Digital Libraries Federation reached 300 000.
In the beginning of 2010 the Digital Libraries Federation was connected with the DART-Europe portal. This allowed to publish in this portal information about PhD theses written in Poland, published in Open Access by several tenths of Polish universities. At the same time PSNC joined the IMPACT research project, in which the PSNC Digital Libraries Team together with the Warsaw University works on OCR mechanisms for Polish old prints. In august 2010 the SYNAT project, funded under strategic research programme of the National Center for Reserach and Development, was started. In ths project the PSNC DL team is researching the architecture of scientific information services and access to the source data in humanities. Besides PSNC is responsible for the development of prototypes of the Integrated Knowledge System and Multifunctional Source Data Repository. In October in Poznań the third edition of the “Polish Digital Libraries” conference co-organized by PSNC was held. Also in October the first version of the Access IT project e-learning courses was published. The last month of 2010 brought the beginning of Wf4Ever research project. The total number of publications available via the DLF reached 0.5 million in the same month. In 2010 ten new deployments of dLibra project were started, including two outside of Poland: one in Belgrade (Serbia) and one in Jerusalem (Israel).