[Foundation-l] National library of Serbia and Wikimedian projects: call for ideas

[phoebe ayers]

On 10/9/07, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a good relations with Sreten Ugricic, director of National
> Library of Serbia [1]. So, we are able to make a lot of things there.
>
> However, I realized that possibilities for cooperation with the
> library are much bigger then possibilities of Wikimedian community in
> Belgrade. Between 5 and 10 Wikimedians and CC-ians who are willing to
> work on that are enough just for very small cooperation projects.
>
> So, there are two major questions:
>
> - What are your ideas for cooperation?
> - Do you have ideas how to help?


Milos,

I don't have any specially good ideas regarding how to collaborate with the
National Library of Serbia -- it depends a bit on what they are interested
in, what their technical resources are, and whether they are interested in
providing content to us or perhaps somehow using Wikimedia content, or both.
The people who work on Commons may have good ideas.

In general though I want to put in a vote of support for possible
collaboration with national libraries; they are a fabulous and often little
recognized resource outside of their home countries. I know Wikimedia has
had interactions with such libraries in the past; a few people went to talk
with the Library of Congress last year (did anything happen with that? Any
tasks waiting to be done?), and in 2005 we had a talk from and a fabulous
tour of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt. There are lots of
smaller countries with libraries and archives that are eager to share their
resources with the world as well, though (I had an interesting experience
touring libraries in various countries in Eastern Europe a couple years ago;
they seemed culture-rich but often technology-poor).

BTW, on this note I'd like to recommend this site:
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ as a fun catalog for things in various
European national libraries. Incomplete, but getting better... the virtual
keyboard is especially awesome. And, they include a link to search Wikipedia
in their "link to other services" for each item :)

-- phoebe