After lunch in the library's cafe, we had a lecture by the director of NTL, Martin Svoboda. Dr. Svoboda has a background in IT, and was hired by the State Technical Library in 1988 to begin automation of the library.
Throughout the next decades, the library has gone through several iterations of automation, including the project called CASLIN, which began in 1991 with a vision of a "library network providing . . . users with easy, fast and unrestrictive access to information." The project was funded by a grant from A.W. Mellon, and many of the principles are still followed today, including standards such as UNIMARC, AACR, tcp/ip, and Z39.50.
Additionally, this work laid the foundations for a national Union catalog, which is being realized today.
Next we heard from Martin Lhotak, who is working on the digitization project at the Academy of Sciences Library.
They have recently purchased a ScanRobot, which enables scanning of an average of 1,000 pages per hour, while protecting the book (see video at http://www.treventus.com/index_en.html).
Once the books are scanned, a software program called Book Restorer cleans up the scanned images by cropping, filtering, converting colors, straightening, etc. The final pages are presented in a clean, crisp image.
Though copyright restrictions prevent non-library members from accessing the majority of the full text, the project can be seen at the Kramerius website (same site as the digitization project of the National Library that we learned about last week).
Shoutout to Jen G., cataloging and metadata queen.
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