On Tuesday August 7th 2001, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek received a delegation of the Congress of the United States of America. The visit was initiated by The Library of Congress in Washington DC. The delegation, lead by Rep. Charles Taylor, came to visit the Koninklijke Bibliotheek because of the international outstanding position of the library in the field of preservation of digital collections.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands, has successfully been working on a depository of digital publications for some years now. Therefore, a high quality and large-scale storage system is being developed in a strategic co-operation with IBM. For the development of this Deposit for Netherlands Electronic Publications the KB is subsidised by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
The delegation of the American Congress spoke with Johan Steenbakkers, the director on Information Technology and Facility Management who is responsible for developing the digital deposit. The delegation was informed of the several national digitisation and preservations projects in which the KB is involved.
In December 2000 Rep. Taylor took the initiative to grant $100 million to The Library of Congress for the development of a 'National Digital Information and Preservation Program'. For this reason Johan Steenbakkers visited Washington earlier this year to advice The Library of Congress on the issues of digital preservation.
8 August 2001
|
| Johan Steenbakkers (left) presents a copy of Collectors and collections to Charles Taylor |