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Purpose
The overarching aim of this article is to consider to what extent the perceptions of librarians in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden reflect a unified view of their professional role and the role of their institutions in supporting the formation of the public sphere and to what extent the variations reflect national contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
The multi-country comparison is based on online questionnaires. The central research questions are how do librarians legitimize the use of public resources to uphold a public library service? How do librarians perceive the role of public libraries as public spaces? How do librarians perceive their professional role and the competencies needed for it? Consideration is given to how the digital and social turns are reflected in the responses.
Findings
The results show evidence of a unified professional culture with clear influences from national contexts. A key finding is that librarians see giving access as central for both legitimizing library services and for the library's role as a public sphere institution. Strong support is shown for the social turn in supporting the formation of the public sphere while the digital turn appears to be a future challenge; one of seemingly increased importance due to the pandemic.
Research limitations/implications
This study shows that libraries across the seven countries have expanded beyond simply providing public access to their book-based collections and now serve as social, learning and creative spaces: both in the physical library and digitally. Qualitative research is needed concerning librarians' notions of public libraries and librarianship, which will provide a more in-depth understanding of the changing professional responsibilities and how public libraries recruit the associated competencies.
Originality/value
The article provides a much needed insight into how librarians perceive the role of public libraries in supporting the formation of the public sphere and democratic processes, as well as their own role.
In this article we describe a concept for the digital preservation of the cultural heritage of smaller cultural institutions without their own infrastructure, in order to preserve and use digital objects in the long term. For this purpose, a digital archive will be extended by a pre-ingest component, which will aggregate the digital objects of the cultural institutions and provide access to the archived information. The proposed system for distributed digital preservation can be described by an extended Open Archive Information System (OAIS) reference model—the Outer-Inner OAIS (OO-IO) model. In the Federal state of Brandenburg there are about 340 archives, museums and libraries. Most of them are rather small but of great significance for cultural heritage. The digital preservation of data and information is therefore one of the biggest challenges. Unfortunately, smaller institutions often lack the knowledge and the resources to meet this challenge. The described approach supports these cultural and research institutions in their efforts to preserve cultural heritage.
While digitalization opens up new possibilities for cultural heritage and tourism it also brings new challenges. Initiatives such as “Europeana”, an internet portal for cultural heritage within the European Union, support institutions with the display of their collections. National initiatives complement these efforts. This report describes initiatives and projects for generating and sustaining digital cultural heritage resources in the German state of Brandenburg. With the cultural heritage distributed throughout the state and managed by hundreds of institutions, the task of digitalization is a common challenge for all of these institutions. Digitalization and digital sustainability is limited by shortcomings in areas of human resources, knowledge and IT infrastructure. In light of these limitations, the cultural heritage community addresses challenges with an interdisciplinary approach. It is based on a collaborative model with four levels: (1) a statewide strategy of an interdisciplinary task force; (2) cooperative projects; (3) cooperative IT infrastructure; and (4) an overall coordination. The priorities are: (1) creating and displaying digital content; (2) establishing best practices and workflows; (3) developing cooperative infrastructures for sustainment. Since 2012, several projects have been implemented based on that collaborative model. More than 50 participating institutions benefited from cooperative planning, managing, digitizing and digital presentation. With regard to the third priority, the task force’s next step is finding solutions for digital preservation. Considering the lack of funding and resources in the cultural heritage sector, options for creating and sustaining digital resources are limited. Digital cultural heritage requires interdisciplinary thinking, cooperative initiatives, reliable IT infrastructures and additional funding.