National Library of Estonia and University of Tartu Library call everybody to suggest which books, written by Estonian authors, should be digitised in the first order. Digitisation will be carried out under the four-year-long European project EODOPEN, aiming at making 15 000 texts from the 20th and 21st centuries digitally accessible to all in the digital format.

According to the Director General of National Library of Estonia the period of the emergency situation and restrictions have shown that it is essentially important to guarantee that the information and literature would be digitally accessible as much as possible. „This can be achieved only when we take the needs and requests of the readers into account – starting from an ordinary citizen and ending up with the students and researchers. In a longer perspective it is particularly important that the Estonian literature and information would be accessible in the whole world,“ said Andresoo and added that the topic is very closely related also to the year of digital culture which is led by National Library of Estonia.

„Crises situation has indicated a clear future trend,“ said UT Library Director Krista Aru when commenting the initiative. “The more different learning materials and books we can make accessible to students and researchers, the wider are the possibilities of using them for studying and doing research under whichever conditions there may be. The use of digital materials and the need for them is ever increasing.”

The libraries have already made a list of materials to be digitised, based on user statistics, but suggestions from all people are very welcome. Also, suggestions can be given also by the publishers and authors themselves.

The aim is to make accessible mostly books by Estonian authors from the 20th and 21st centuries, and thus, particular attention is paid to the copyright issues, In case of every book an approval from the publisher as well as the author is asked and upon the receipt of the consent the libraries are immediately ready to start digitisation.

Suggestions can be submitted on the homepage of National Library of Estonia www.nlib.ee/eodopen or webpage of UT Library utlib.ut.ee/en/eodopen

All digitised books will be immediately added to the digital archive of National Library of Estonia digar.ee or UT Library digital archive on DSpace.

Apr 29, 2020