Long-term Preservation Issues

The Czech Republic has earned worldwide recognition for its remarkable results in the area of cultural heritage preservation. However, digitisation and digital preservation are significantly hindered by a lack of resources. This results in a relatively slow pace of digitisation. Furthermore, it leads to serious delays in dealing with, and solving, current digital preservation issues. This paper explores a “National Digital Library ” project, which has been accepted by the Ministry of Culture as a candidate for European funding under the Integrated Operational Programme. The National Library of the Czech Republic, along with the Moravian State Library in Brno, have prepared an ambitious project with two main goals – 1) to accelerate the digitisation; 2) to establish a trusted long-term preservation repository. 1.2 million documents should be digitised within the next 20 years. The most fragile documents should be digitised during the five-year project between 2010 and 2015. The following paper reflects on the issues we have to face in preparation for this project. The mass digitising encourages the institutions which are involved to make a number o