On September 23–25, 2009, the XXIII meeting of the Conference of Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) took place in National Library of Spain in Madrid. Director of National Library of Belarus R.S. Motulsky participated in the meeting.
At the CENL meeting R.S. Motulsky delivered a paper “National Library of Belarus as an information, social and cultural center of the country” which aroused interest of participants and was discussed with animation. Participants of the meeting expressed their admiration for the high level of development of the Library and current conceptual and technological decisions many of which passed ahead of the biggest European libraries. Representatives of libraries of Germany, France, Spain, Vatican, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other countries wished to visit National Library of Belarus in the near future to familiarize themselves with its work.
CENL unites national libraries of the Council of Europe member states. Its aim is to increase and reinforce the role of national libraries for safekeeping of national cultural heritage and providing the free access to information.
CENL was founded in 1987. Today 48 national libraries of 46 countries, including national libraries of the CIS member states – Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, – are members of the CENL.
Being a maintainer of national libraries, CENL has also initiated a number of big projects which aim is to preserve national cultural values of European states.
According to the Statute of the CENL each library can be presented by one person only, namely a National Librarian of the country.
During the meeting the urgent issues of the CENL and joint international project were discussed.
The project Gabriel (Gateway and Bridge to Europes National Libraries) launched in 1996 has become the basis for the joint information server, an online guidebook on stocks and collections of national libraries of Europe. Actually, this is one of the biggest sources of information on European national libraries and the center of their cooperation and interaction.
Since 2004, the project TEL (The European Library) has become quite popular. The project founded with the aim of developing of a distributed digital library of Europe is designed for multilingual interactive access to particular parts of collections of national libraries. Today the European Library is an information portal under the aegis of the CENL which provides access to Internet catalogs and collections of national libraries.
The project Europeana (The European Digital Library) is designed for the extensible access to electronic copies of books and other documents which represent cultural heritage of Europe. The project was officially launched at the end of 2008 although national libraries of 27 member states of the European Union had proceeded to the development of the project in summer 2007. At this stage 5 million documents are to be scanned and placed at users’ disposal on Internet (actually more than 2 million documents have been scanned). By the end of 2010 the amount of scanned documents must reach 10 million. There will be not only books but also paintings, films, manuscripts and audio records. 90 museums, national libraries and archives participate in the project. Today documents in French, German and English languages are accessible. In future materials in all European languages are to be added. The following countries have contributed into the development of the European Digital Library the most: France (50 % scanned data), Great Britain (10 %), Spain (1,4 %) and Germany (1 %).
 |
 |
