22-05-10 22.56 Main Articles: 'The Norwegian National Digital Library', Ariadne Issue 60 Side 1 av 9 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/takle/ Issue 60 July 2009 The Norwegian National Digital Library Marianne Takle describes the National Library of Norway’s digitisation strategy and how the National Library is taking on a key role in the country’s digital library service. Introduction The National Library of Norway is in the process of establishing itself as a digital national library and of taking on a key role in the country's digital library service. The most ambitious outcome of this positioning is that the National Library has comprehensive plans to digitise its entire collection. The digital national library has been given the name NBdigital , and its objective of establishing itself as a digital library is also reflected in the institution’s practices. Resources have been redistributed so as to give priority to digitisation, and competence in digital media is being enhanced. Growing numbers of documents are being deposited in digital format, as is the case in the collaborative project with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). Agreements on the digital deposit of certain newspapers and of books from some publishers have also been established. By gradually supplementing the traditional library with digitised collections, the National Library of Norway is adapting to the transition from printed books to electronic media. The relationship between collections and digital techniques has now entered a new phase in which the most important issue is not one of having access to the catalogues by means of digital communication, but rather one of making the content of the collections available to users over the Internet. This poses a number of new challenges of a technical, financial and legal nature. Through active policy-making in both the technical and the political areas, the National Library of Norway has become a key participant in the development of solutions to meet these challenges. Three Strategy Documents to Digitise All Norwegian Material In its strategy documents from 2005, the National Library defined its main goals to be to ‘form the core of the Norwegian Digital Library’ [ 1 ]. Since then, this goal has been further refined into three new strategy documents which deal exclusively with a digital national library. The first strategy document concerning the digital national library was published in February 2005 and was entitled ‘Det digitale nasjonalbibliotek – Strategimanifest 2005’ (‘The Digital National Library– Strategy Manifesto 2005’). The justification for the digitisation work focused on the needs of the users. Furthermore, the strategy manifesto claimed that the Library had the potential to provide access to a rich and varied content on all desktops and in every home. Importance was placed on the National Library’s contribution to enabling the Norwegian library community to provide new and improved services to a variety of stakeholders, and the National Library would facilitate learning and research. In this way the Library intended to serve all user groups: students and researchers, the rest of the country’s libraries, and the entire population. This perspective of the general public as