Author Archives: Kerstin Meinel

30 years have passed since my first participation in CENL Annual General Meeting events. All three directors of Baltic national libraries were invited to CENL right after our countries joined the Council of Europe. I started working in the National Library of Latvia in 1989 at the age of 32. That was the time when upcoming projects were still at the stage of ideas and EU funding had only began. I can attest that the birth of Europeana is attributed to a CENL initiative.

In May 2023 the National Széchényi Library (NSZL) received the Ambassador of the republic of Türkiye, who presented the gift of the Presidential Library to the NSZL, a book donation of 225 volumes of books on various subjects. The book donation will enrich the collection of the National Library in the future.

This year’s Marek Nowakowski Literary Award was been won by Aleksandra Majdzińska for her book Szalom bonjour Odessa, an evocative portrait of the city before the Russian aggression against Ukraine, described by the author in a series of short, realistic pictures.

During his visit, Earl of St Andrews gave the Library a very valuable early printed work which belonged to the first Polish National Library in the eighteenth century, opened in Warsaw in 1747 by Józef and Andrzej Załuski.

According to the first carbon footprint assessment of the National Library of Finland, most of the Library’s emissions in 2019 were generated by procurement and energy consumption at its facilities. In the coming years, the intention is to investigate the carbon footprint of other operations, including digital services and digitisation.

In May 2023, 64 new items of documentary heritage were inscribed on the Memory of the World International Register, among which The illuminated manuscripts of Charlemagne’s Court School. The application was submitted jointly by the Stadtbibliothek de Trier (Germany) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with the support of the institutions that preserve the manuscripts in France and Europe.

The documentary exhibition “Sarajevo Assassination” (Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), by Valerijan Žuja, was opened at the Bošnjački institut (Bosniak Institute). The exhibition contains multimedia, so in addition to the exhibits, extensive video material is also shown, which also presents materials that could not be seen before.

On 16-17 May the National Library of Estonia had the pleasure of welcoming colleagues from the National Library of the Czech Republic for a joint workshop. The workshop, initiated by Director General Tomáš Foltýn, was held on the occasion of the official visit of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic and offered a multi-faceted programme, ranging from development strategies to digital activities.

The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania is pleased to present a new publication—an open-access collection of articles in English “Theatrum libri: Book Printing, Reading and Dissemination in Early Modern Europe” (Vilnius, 2022). The collection is based on the papers presented at the international conference “Theatrum Libri: The Press, Reading and Dissemination in Early Modern Europe”.