Czech libraries protect and show historic documents with open source
In August 2002 a week of heavy rains in central Europe caused serious flooding, resulting damage running to billions of euros in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia.
Amongst the items damaged were a large number of books in the Czech Republic’s archives and libraries. While the damaged documents were being recovered, a decision was taken to make digital copies publicly accessible.
Joinup, the EU’s open source news website now reports that libraries in the Czech Republic are sharing and re-using a specialised open source content management system, Kramerius, to preserve historic documents and make them available online. Kramerius was developed with the support of the Library of the Academy of Sciences, the National Library (both in Prague), and the Moravian Library in Brno.
Kramerius is intended for use for digitised library collections, monographs and periodicals. It can also be used for maps, musical scores and illustrations and to provide access to selections of documents, articles and chapters.
In addition, Kramerius is part of a larger Czech Digital Library Project which aims to digitise the greater part of the resources of the National Library and the Moravian Library and thus to help to preserve them and make them accessible for future generations. It is hoped that over 50 million pages, or approximately 300 thousand volumes will be digitised by 2019.
The Czech Digital Library project has a budget of CZK 20 million (about €800,000) over the next 3 years.
As a matter of course, the Kramerius source code is also available online.
The software itself is named after Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), who was a Czech writer, journalist and publisher. At a time when there was only a single Czech newspaper in print, Kramerius started his own paper and, following its commercial success, established a printing shop and publishing house for Czech language works. The majority of Czech language books were published by his publishing house at that time. Kramerius himself wrote about 80 books.
There’s also an English language summary (PDF) of the Kramerius project available.