Abstract
Networked, open and inclusive
In the past 10 years, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, has gone through three major transitions. In the first place, the library has gone from a primarily physical to a primarily digital library. In the second place, we have taken up roles in the public library network, giving us a much larger stake in society in areas like literacy and digital literacy. In the third place, we no longer look at the borders of our own institution as the end of our remit, we work as a network organization to further intellectual development, proficiency and creativity in the Netherlands. These transformations have made our library in 2019 a very different place than it was in 2009. We now reach a public of millions with our digital services, a third of the Dutch population. We are looking forward to the next decade, in which we seek to expand our platform role to enable more people to read, learn and do research and in which we will be the first primarily digital national library to build a new physical space (see Figure 1).Every era brings new challenges for a national library. We are very aware that we are part of a changing landscape. We have seen the huge impact that the digital transformation of society is having on people and organizations. This transformation is still in full swing: combinations of new technologies will enable us to do things that were never deemed possible. The next decade will see a great expansion of information, as well as exciting new opportunities to be able to use this material, such as linked open data and artificial intelligence. We have recently developed seven guidelines to help us harness the power of artificial intelligence, to provide better services and new knowledge, while retaining our public and inclusive values. This focus on societal value, using the power of people and technology, is essential to the continued relevancy of a national library.
The three core roles of the national library.
We believe that delivering on our goals is important in shaping that landscape as much as that landscape is shaping us. To ensure our contribution is relevant nationally and internationally, we have geared our strategy towards delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed on by the 193 United Nations. We believe, as a national library, we can contribute to public access to information, furthering literacy and science and preserving our cultural heritage.
We cannot do this by ourselves. We see that society is developing alternative forms of living and working together. As a national library, we want to be part of that. At the moment, we are working together on an institutional level. As an institute for academic research, we take an active part in academic networks, particularly in the network of university libraries and networks revolving around the use of text in academic research and open science. As a heritage organization, we do all we can to develop the Digital Heritage Network, so that digital collections will be more visible, usable and sustainable. As a national digital public library, we want to ensure user-friendly, easy access to digital reading material for all Dutch people and we try to achieve digital public spaces. As a public library authority, we strive to build up a powerful network of public libraries, with an active role in the heart of society, to help create an informed, inspired and connected society. We also work with strong community partners such as Wikipedia. In the next decade, we see our role shifting from working with institutions to working alongside the community. Institutions will be powerful nodes in a network that encompasses society and that has a low barrier to participation. This will enable more diversity and inclusion in our shared stories and the way these have found expression in media. This change will mean another transformation for our library, to be egalitarian rather than hierarchical, more flexible and with a focus on people rather than systems.
In all these changes, we have not lost our focus on being a custodian of the written word. We are a stable and immutable ‘repository’ for preserving the books, newspapers and magazines published in the Netherlands. Since the 1990s, we have also focused on gathering, storing and sharing digital forms of the written word. Our faith in the power of the written word translates into respect and love for the collections (both digital and printed) that encompass those words. The power of these words is what drives us to achieve our objectives. We want to reach as many people as possible to let them experience the power of the written word – through scientific ideas, appealing stories, information about their families or the historical sensation of (almost physical) contact with people who wrote and shaped the past.
Our national library has a comparatively small remit, with a strong focus on the written word. This has led us to work together closely with other heritage partners in the area of (audiovisual) archives and museums in the Network Digital Heritage. We believe that together, we can create a mirror-world, showing people what came before in a very relevant way (‘what happened here’). As a national library, we will have to learn to live with a smaller share of attention for text and reading as they are now. On the other hand, we look beyond the way the written word is dominantly conveyed at this point (through books, newspapers and journals, whether e- or paper). We think social platforms on which writers and readers convene, like Wikipedia does for information, might also be a growth area for fiction. And we strongly believe the humanities are essential to help us create a human-centred knowledge environment, harnessing the power of networks of people and data. With the public libraries, we will work together to help people participate in the digital society.
As a national library, we have achieved a large share of the ambitions my predecessor foresaw almost 10 years ago: we have 100 million digitized pages online, work in a networked digital infrastructure and guarantee long-term access to digital information (see Savenije, 2011). In the process, we have fundamentally changed our organization to be more outward-looking, more digitally minded and more open to adapt to our changing environment. These are skills we will need to hone to be successful in the next decade. The year 2030 is the timeline for achieving the sustainable development goals. I hope my successor will be able to conclude that we have delivered on the ambition to contribute to those goals.