Another year is almost over, and like last year, the Secretariat has asked CENL members to look back at what their national libraries have achieved in 2023 and what they are looking forward to in 2024.
Looking back on the second year of the Secretariat’s work at the German National Library, we started a new term 2023-2025 for the Networks Groups with a new group: The Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Network Group (EEDI).
We have been pleased to continue our ‘Funds and Grants’ programme for staff of member libraries. And we are grateful for a wonderful Annual General Meeting at the National Library of France in Paris. During the business meeting, the Board agreed on the new CENL strategy. And our topic of sustainability was very important and relevant. We will be publishing some of the contributions we heard there soon.
Unfortunately, our hopes for a quick end to the war in Ukraine have not been fulfilled. So we must continue to wait for peace to return there and in other parts of the world.
All the members of the Secretariat would like to thank you for the pleasant and trusting cooperation in 2023, and we are very much looking forward to continuing it in 2024.
Season’s greetings and a very Happy New Year!
Anna Chulyan, National Library of Armenia – Director
Dr. Johanna Rachinger, Austrian National Library – Director General
Dr Ivanka Stričević, National and University Library in Zagreb – Director
Tomas Foltyn, National Library of the Czech Republic – Director General
Tomas Foltyn, National Library of the Czech Republic – Director General
Martin Öövel, National Library of Estonia – Director
Frank Scholze, German National Library – Director General
Dr. Audrey Whitty, National Library of Ireland – Director
Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania – Director General
Dr. Claude D. Conter, National Library of Luxembourg – Director
The National Library looks back on a remarkable 2023 – a year of significance as we celebrated our 225th anniversary. On this joyful occasion, we deepened our connection with our users through numerous events and open days. Additionally, we demonstrated once more our innovative expertise through pioneering projects such as the new AI-powered chatbot on the eluxemburgensia.lu portal, which assists users in exploring Luxembourg’s history by drawing on digitised newspaper articles. In terms of staffing, we have strengthened our team by welcoming new colleagues and appointing a deputy director.
As we move forward, we have identified areas for improvement. We are committed to optimising our relationship with users in light of the new library system Alma. Its implementation proved to be more complex and wide-ranging than anticipated, making the process significantly time-consuming to complete.
Our priorities for the upcoming year are diverse. Firstly, we aim to reach agreements with the national collecting society and publishers to be able to provide remote access and digital lending to users. Secondly, we plan to expand the network of libraries and extend our digital offerings to new partners. We approach the new year with ambition and determination and hope to make it as successful as the last.
Dr. Lily Knibbeler, KB National Library of the Netherlands – Director General
Rahmetulla Kuqi, National and University St. Clement of Ohrid in Skopje – Director General
2023 was a challenge for me. We made a lot of magnificent events, cooperation, and projects. I am glad that I have a good team behind me.
2024 will be the year of innovation. We would like to continue with the green agenda and to concentrate more on the users of all ages.
The best part of this time of year is the memories we make. Happy holidays!
Dr. Tomasz Makowski, National Library of Poland – Director General
Ing. Katarína Krištofová, PhD., Slovak National Library – Director General
2023 marked the beginning of a new era of the Slovak National Library: we launched an innovative digital library portal called DIKDA on https://dikda.snk.sk/, through which approximately 1,5 million of out-of-commerce and public domain Slovak-related works are made available to the public in the countries of the European Economic Area – without limits, legally and for free, based on an extended collective licensing agreement with the Slovak CMO LITA.
This enabled us to focus on the development of digital services for our users in Slovakia and in Europe and become pioneers in utilizing the new EU DSM legislation. I am happy to announce that it has been a success – more and more users are approaching our collection only virtually and we expect that the number of digital transactions will exceed the number of physical loans anytime soon. We are excited to build on this in 2024 and beyond, so wish us luck!
And, as the holiday season is approaching, I would also like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! All the best!
Ana Santos Aramburo, National Library of Spain – Director General
In 2023, the new legal deposit law came into force at the National Library of Spain. This has enabled us to increase digital content, together with a decisive boost to the digitization of our collections. We have also made a significant commitment to a varied cultural program, open and aimed at all kinds of audiences, which has brought many new people to the Biblioteca Nacional’s headquarters. We face the year 2024 full of hopes and new projects, fundamentally related to everything to do with the reuse of digital content aimed at the development of Artificial Intelligence tools, using the large amount of content we have and also thinking about a new cultural program that shows the openness that this institution should make to Spanish society.
Karin Grönvall, National Library of Sweden – National librarian of Sweden
Sir Roly Keating, The British Library – Chief Executive
Laurence Engel, President of the National Library of France
2023 has been a decisive year in the implementation of the digital legal deposit at the BnF, following the entry into force of the 2021 French Law extending the scope of legal deposit to born digital contents. The institution as a whole has been involved in this cross-cutting issue, relying on legal, scientific and technical work. The BnF has been actively involved in drafting the implementation decree to be published in 2024, while working on the upgrade of its technical infrastructures to accomodate the various workflows and the increasing amount of data. The scientific legal deposit policy is also being adapted to the variety of born-digital types of content, and special attention is being paid to training the workforce.
A highlight of the year 2023 is also the continuation of our commitment to safeguard and promote Ukrainian’s heritage and to help build capacities, and four Ukrainian professionals have been hosted at the BnF for a professional residence. The recruitement of an Officer in charge of Ukraine in the International Engagement Team has enforced and secured our actions.
The year 2024 will, among others, be marked by the deployment of AI-based services, in particular in the field of image recognition (Gallica Images) and the continuation of R&D and experimentation activities with AI (discoverability, handwritten text recognition, assisted cataloguing).