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In the course of discussions about the process of
European integration, it is from time to time quite right reminded, that the
thing that is real-ly able to unite Europe – whatever the form and depth of
integration will be – is the in-herited, commonly experienced spiritual
values and the cultural heritage also felt as the common; and besides it is
the experience of common information space and cooperation on the
development of learning and extending knowledge. And in addition, also the
common culture surely involves commonly accepted ways and instruments of
communication, even their material manifestation.
It is generally accepted as the fact that a writ-ten word,
a text, ranks among significant pillars of European culture. Therefore books
and other forms of text carriers themselves became the symbol and respected
cultural value, the subject of collecting, organization and care, and at
last of scholars´ interest. Library collections are an important part of
cultural heritage and belong to the riches of each country. Further more,
the identity of the given national community itself is often connected with
this “memory”.
If we would like to define the concept of European
library collection, then we could not only mechanically make the total of
indi-vidual imaginary national collections, in the narrow sense of meaning
marked off by state borders or even only by languages. It is the fact that
despite a certain barrier created mainly by variety of languages, a library
collection representing a certain country is not delimited and marked off
neither geo-graphically nor by language. In each European country, more or
less, a complete library collection comprises very different documents both
in the aspects of language and those of provenance to such extent that in
certain way they universally reflect cultural and histo-rical development of
the given wider region in which they are situated, if not directly that of
the whole Europe.
To a large extent, the above mentioned applies to the
book riches preserved up to the present in the Czech Lands, and in the
National Library in particular. However, it is not the question of heritage
only, it concerns the present active and planned building of a collection of
infor-mation sources, which is aimed at both collecting the national documents
and making them accessible to ourselves and to the whole world, as well as
at acquiring a reasonable and structured selection of the world production
for national use.
In accordance with the international pro-gramme of the
Universal Bibliographical Control and that of the Universal Availability of
Publications, each of the National Libraries is responsible to the
international community on the one hand, for a complete collection of documents published in the particular country and for preservation of
completeness and integrity of this collection, and on the other hand, for a
complete and comprehensible information about this collection accessible to all. It means that the National Library is res-ponsible for its national
bibliography that meets criteria of international exchangeability of data.
And further, of course, it should make accessible its own texts from the
national collection to anybody all over the world who requests them.
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In other words, in our present context, libraries – and
especially the National ones – have the task to contribute in a concrete way
to common creation of the spiritual riches of Europe. For this reason,
National Libraries join forces in cooperation; they are closely connected
with each other by both functional networks and mutual responsibility to common
programmes, as well as by agreements on com-mon projects, some of which are
supported by the European bodies. The community of National Libraries also
has a permanent institutional form, called the Conference of European
National Libraries, which systematically develops the above–mentioned common
activities. In brief, its objective is to overcome borders and to share the
spi-ritual riches on the territory of the whole Europe: this should be
attained by means of interconnecting the national bibliographies and
catalogues of libraries in one source, making thus accessible the European
book riches as one whole.
National Libraries are then, I dare say, the Eu-ropean
institutions and significantly contri-bute to preservation and development
of Euro-pean values.
At present, European National Libraries are in charge of
significant collections of clas-sical as well as digital documents from both
the national and the universal European production. In addition, they most
often play a coordination role in joint structures for sha-ring information
and collections in the parti-cular country despite the cooperation and relations
to the publishers. They are thus important intersections for sharing values
and pieces of knowledge within the bounds of European context.
So far a rather unattainable objective, to build and
open one large common European library, seems now to be quite feasible
thanks to the development and offer of powerful techno-logical instruments.
Such a virtual library would make it possible for literally anybody from
anywhere to search information about documents and also to get at the texts
themselves, whenever in Europe are they located.
The Consortium of European National Libraries has
prepared a project called The Eu-ropean Library (TEL), which by the middle of the year 2003 should lay the foundation and create technological, legal, and
orga-nizational conditions for this kind of “Pan – European” service. The
project is supported by the European Commission as the accom-panying measure
in sphere of cultural heritage within the framework of the key activities
nr. 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme.
It counts on creating a uniform gateway for access to
bibliographical sources and to di-gital and classical documents of European
libraries themselves as well. The infrastructure for sharing information in
the fields of science, technical knowledge, and culture within the whole
Europe gains quite concrete form.
The Czech National Library is an active participant of
the above - mentioned European cooperation. It is a pleasure for us to say
that the National Library participates in such a con-crete and, as we hope,
also efficient way in the process of approaching Europe and in strengthening
integration and creating new forms of European cooperation.
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