National Library without Borders – the Brazilian experience

Citation

(2002), "National Library without Borders – the Brazilian experience", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 30 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2002.12230daf.002

National Library without Borders – the Brazilian experience

Since Gutenberg's days, the latest information technologies have caused a huge impact on knowledge transmission. To adapt to the new era, the National Library Foundation of Brazil has been making great efforts in order to improve its technical structure. The main goal is to increase the number of users – either present or remote – to have access to new technology.

For this purpose, in 2001 we created a special Commission, aiming at bringing about new Libraries and Digital Archives to develop a project called National Library without Borders. This project was designed by the chairman of the National Library Foundation, Eduardo Portella, and among the members are Commission chairman Ana Ligia Medeiros, Adriana Balleste, FBN Webmaster and Master in Computer Sciences, and Ana Pavani, professor and consultant of several Brazilian and international organizations.

The National Library without Borders is based on three fundamentals: improving infrastructure, implementing new technology, and deploying new services to remote users. As the first fundamental consists of improvement on our basic infrastructure, we acquired new workstations, servers, scanners, and printers. Also, we added new logical networks to interconnect the National Library departments placed in different locations of the city, leading to a higher speed in our data transmission system.

As to the infrastructure, we must point to the expansion of online catalogues. All these improvements enabled us to offer electronic searching of the retrospective catalogues existing in our organization by means of innovative and creative procedures, allowing for the duplication of our bibliographical records. Furthermore, several national library employees have been adequately trained to deal with such technologies in order to best serve our users.

The second fundamental is the implementation of up-to-date information technologies and communications, in terms of capture, storage and preservation procedures, updating, reproduction, copyright protection, search, recovery and dissemination of digital documents. Up to now, 630,000 images have been digitized, covering rare works, drawings, maps, musical texts, manuscripts, newspapers and magazines. The organization of such documents complies with the latest international standards so that there is an easy data exchange with other countries.

Finally, the last action aims at facilitating the library services so that they become available to remote users. We made a deep analysis of the administrative procedures the common citizen, which included the Copyright Office (ERA), Standard Book Number Office (ISBN), Virtual Book etc.

A new Web site that encompasses all is being produced by the National Library Foundation using the most recent technological tools for the Web, such as CRM (Citizen Relationship Management) and e-commerce.

The CRM feature enables citizens to interact with FBN. The user will be able to do research using a virtual desk where he will find records of the works he/she selects. Besides providing a way to keep track of the historical aspects of the entire researches done within our Web site, there will also be reading suggestions within the same area of the research, so that the user can keep updated with the latest national bibliographical production as well as the most recent acquisitions.

Our intention is to expand our collection available on the Web and to integrate cultural and educational institutions in Brazil with their international counterparts. All of the above techniques intend to achieve a new paradigm in serving ordinary citizens a 24/7 online system, anywhere in the world.

In short, the National Library without Borders means a democratization of knowledge through a wide disclosure of our collections. Some of the treasures that were previously now are fully available through the Internet, for example: Biblia de Mogun¬cia (1462), the first edition of Os Lusiadas (1572), Book of Hours, the First Grammar of the Portuguese Language by João de Barros (1539) and reports from the first travellers in Brazil.

Because we strongly believe that taking a step to the digital world is a way to integrate people, democratize knowledge and best serve our citizens, we hope that our experience in the digital field will help and stimulate other institutions to take the same step.