VISK 7 – National Funding Mechanism for the digitization and long-term preservation of the newspapers endangered by the degradation of the paper: Looking back over more than 15 years of the cooperation of the Czech libraries

At the beginning of the year 2000 new Czech funding mechanism for the development of the libraries was established by the Czech Government. Probably neither one from past politicians, nor librarians, did expect those days, that this funding program would be still open in 2018 and would be more and more important for many fields of librarianship, including the preservation and digitization of newspapers endangered by the degradation of the paper. Such a long time of more than 15 years is great opportunity to evaluate all the benefits and changes of the supported activities, practices and impacts of the program. The aim of this paper is to provide the information about the more than 15 years history of the VISK 7 funding mechanism, describe achieved results and benefits, and share the reached best practices including the main developed open-source tools