Abstract
Data and people will be the focus of the work of national libraries for the next decade. For centuries libraries have been about books and words, but now it is about data, to be handled and analyzed by machines as the basis for new services, ultimately giving new insight. Many national libraries have iconic buildings, old and new. In the digital age you could easily imagine a virtual national library: an office and storage building somewhere, but no ceremonial building, no reading rooms, no exhibition space, only digital presence. In my view, library buildings will still be part of the city landscape, as places for people to meet, to learn and reflect (and to eat and drink). National libraries have extensive collections. They are only alive, an asset to the public, to the extent that they are digitally accessible, and here we have the greatest challenge in my view, not least because of the present copyright regime. Different words have been used to describe a national library: memory institution, learning centre and so on. More than anything a national library is a service provider, and I am convinced that to succeed national libraries have to develop and deliver services in closer partnership with other organizations, especially other libraries, public, research and educational libraries.
The Royal Danish Library (RDL) is a new entity among national libraries. The following text is a short introduction to this new entity with some suggestions as to the direction in which it is moving.
The RDL is the result of mergers (2016) between Royal Library, Copenhagen (national library and Copenhagen University library and IT University library); State and University Library, Aarhus (national library and Aarhus University library); Danish National Art Library; The Administrative Library (library services to central government); Library functions from the Danish Centre for Research and Information on Gender, Equality and Diversity (KVINFO); Part of Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF): negotiation of e-resources for academic, research and educational libraries and development of shared services for research libraries.
Functions
RDL is Denmark’s national library. The first law on legal deposit was issued in 1697 and was most recently revised in 2004. RDL collects Danish printed publications, sound recordings, radio and television (media archive) and Danish internet material (netarchive.dk). Presently RDL has 9 petabyte of unique digital cultural heritage data, in addition to duplicates of data from the National Archives and the National Gallery (backup). RDL has very large collections of printed books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, photos and maps, and in 2022, RDL will have a new storage facility (with the National Museum of Denmark). Danish books printed before 1900 are digitized on demand and made freely available to the public. So far 40% of the national newspaper collection (35 million pages) have been digitized and digitization continues. RDL operates a nationwide service with on-demand digitization and delivery by email of articles from Danish and foreign professional and scholarly journals (approximately 30,000 journal titles). The RDL is loan centre and repository library for the Danish public libraries.
By virtue of law, RDL is the university library for Copenhagen University, Aarhus University and IT University. In addition, Roskilde University has made a contract with RDL about library services. Negotiations with Aalborg University about a similar contract are almost finished, the result being that RDL provides services to five of the eight Danish universities. RDL has 46,000 m2 of space for the public, 5000 workstations and 2 million visitors (2018) to the library’s locations in Aarhus and Copenhagen. Co-funded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, RDL operates a platform (tidsskrift.dk) for journals published by Danish scholarly and professional societies. Presently 147 Open Access journals use the platform, mostly Danish language journals. Downloads (2018): 3.5 million. In addition, RDL has a publishing service in e-books making it possible for faculty to publish working papers, reports and so on which are not relevant for either university presses or commercial publishers.
Current issues
In 2018, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Higher Education and Science set up a working group on the future arrangement of the research library sector. The small working group commissioned a trend analysis (with input from all university libraries) and an analysis of the future demand for library services, made by a consultancy. In January 2019, the working group published its recommendations which were later endorsed by the two ministers. Two recommendations should be mentioned here:
1. A unified library system for national and university libraries
It was recommended that all universities use the same library system (catalogue and discovery) for printed material and e-resources. The overall aim is to make more material easily accessible for more users and at the same time reduce costs by centralizing back-office functions.
A big step in this direction will be taken in 2019. Today RDL has two library systems, one for the former Royal Library and one for the former State and University Library. At the end of 2019, RDL will have a new library system with metadata for printed material, e-resources and special collections for the whole of RDL. From 2020, all users will use the same system, and ‘university users’ can order material without using interlibrary lending procedures. They will receive ordered printed material via the national library transportation scheme (a speedy transport scheme between all Danish public and research libraries).
As regards public libraries, the 98 Danish public library organizations all use the same system. A portal showing holdings in all publicly funded libraries is funded by the Ministry of Culture (bibliotek.dk).
2. Open science and data management
The trend analysis and the report on the demand for future library services, commissioned by the working group, both stress the importance of library contributions to the broad field of e-science or e-scholarship. Some initiatives in this field have been jointly funded by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Higher Education and Science via Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation (DeIC – a government-funded agency), especially in data management. The working group recommended that the Agency for Science and Higher Education takes responsibility for national coordination in this area. This does not imply that libraries have no role in e-science and that is certainly true for RDL with its dual functions as national library and university library. As a university library, RDL will continue to offer services in data management and in copyright issues, institutional repositories and so on. As the national library, RDL has vast collections of digital material (Danish net archive, digitized radio and TV and newspapers etc.) which are relevant for scholars in many fields. To work with this ‘big data’, DeIC co-fund a small High Performance Computing facility in the RDL.
In January 2019, a government report on a new national digital research infrastructure was published, and RDL is presently working on determining its role in this infrastructure.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.