School day: morning

Today was a lecture day. We took the metro (which has really fast, really steep escalators) to the Faculty of Arts/library school at Charles University.


For our first lecture, Richard, the director of the library program, explained the library school and the various degrees awarded. At Charles, there are more than 600 students in the library program, and they can receive their Bachelor's degree in 3 years, their Master's in another 2, and their PhD in an additional 3-8 years (Charles is the only university in Czech Republic that offers the PhD).


Next, Dr. Lojka, who was our guide yesterday, gave us a condensed history of the Czech Republic. It's very interesting, filled with kings and empires and battles and Nazi occupation, and communism and freedom. We learned a new word: defenestration, which means throwing politicians out of windows.


Our last lecture of the morning was Dr. Jan Hutar (shown here with our fearless leader Barbara), who is leading the digitization project at the National Library (http://www.manuscriptorium.com/). Just yesterday, they received word that they are receiving funding for new scanners, software, and hardware to enable them to scan millions of pages. They are focusing now on 19th century documents, which are printed on acid paper and so in danger of disintegrating.

They are using open source software, Kramerius, to digitize the documents.