UCLA

Keynote Presentation TPDL in Ljubljana, 25 Sept 2024

The late 1980s and early 1990s were turbulent times in Central Europe, as the Berlin Wall and the Kremlin fell, and war erupted in Yugoslavia. Lifting the ‘Iron Curtain’ revealed crumbling infrastructure, both physical and technological. Inside most of the elegant national, university and public library buildings of Central Europe were card catalogs and minimal information technology. The few online catalogs were based on local technologies and served local communities. Digital library development in Central Europe was most advanced in the former Yugoslavia, and of these states, Slovenia was most advanced in cataloging and networking. Thirty years hence, as Slovenia celebrates the 250^th anniversary of the NUK, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the evolution of digital libraries. In the early 1990s, concerns focused on technical standards such as MARC and Unicode, shared catalogs, implementing modern systems, networking, developing local knowledge and expertise, and retrofitting old buildings. Merging, migrating, and sustaining access to bibliographic records were core challenges. Concerns of today focus on distributed access to digitized and born-digital resources, interoperability, and open access to knowledge. Creating, managing, exploiting, and sustaining access to research data and to cultural heritage materials are among the challenges ahead. This talk will explore lessons learned from 1990s work to automate libraries in Central and Eastern Europe that inform theory and practice in digital libraries for the 21^st century.