The keynote speaker for When Nations Remember was John van Oudenaren, Director, World Digital Library. He talked about two projects of the Library of Congress which are American Memory and World Digital Library.

The Library of Congress had gotten the mandate from their Librarian, James Billington, to “get the champagne out of the bottle” by supporting K-12 and not just their traditional customer base of academic researchers. The American Memory project currently has over 19 million items which are free and open access.

They had taken the approach of focusing on public domain items. Library of Congress (LC) curators identified the collections and materials for digitization. Interestingly, the funding for the project came from public and private funding with the larger portion coming from the private sector. The result was a collection that was strong for images on history and popular culture but weak on science and technology. There were also varying presentation styles used and different metadata used to describe the items. John pointed out that this would be a challenge for the future.

They are working on moving the collections to a standardized template for a consistent look and feel, and facilitating searching across the entire American Memory project. Another focus area is working with teachers to bring the primary materials available in American History into the classroom.

John pointed out that although LC had put American Memory on the web 15 years ago, it was only when they loaded a selection of images on Flickr in 2008 that they increased the public awareness of the availability of the content. Everyone faces a great challenge to compete for the attention of the user who are increasingly using different modes and devices to access information and who has a limited amount of time.

John then talked about the World Digital Library whose mission is to make “available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world”. LC had worked with over 100 partners, including UNESCO. They ensured that there was good metadata for the items, included explanations for the content which was a value add for the users. They made the search interface flexible, visual and fast. The site is also multilingual with translations done by professionals with some help from technology that checks if the term or phrase had been translated previously.

LC plans to work on developing the national capacity for digitization in developing countries. The highest usage of the World Digital Library comes from Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and China with Spanish being the most commonly used language.

John also mentioned that the Library of Congress did not create content but they have started on the margins, an oral history project to collect the personal accounts of American war veterans. He acknowledged the importance and challenge of archiving social networking sites.

Penny Carnaby from the National Library of New Zealand spoke on the ways they have collected the memories of the recent earthquake in Christchurch. They had sent out photographers to take pictures and oral historians to gather stories. They used social media like wikis and flickr to allow the public to contribute their stories and pictures. The National Library took on a coordinator role and worked with libraries, schools, town councils and universities to gather the resources.

Another initiative that the National Library of New Zealand  is working on is to gather and make government data accessible to the public. They would like to make it a reality that all the valuable data collected by the government is available for re-use many times over.

I welcome other contributions on the conference. Send them to slb@las.org.sg.

Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin