The vision of the National Library of Estonia is to be a new generation library and a driving force for other Estonian libraries. Taking that into account, the National Library has launched several development projects.
The project aims to create a unified discovery and delivery portal for accessing digital cultural heritage. This will address the current issue of fragmentation of material, provide a consistent user experience, and enable users to search across the entire digital collection. The new portal will adhere to accessibility standards, be mobile-friendly, and offer users enhanced opportunities to engage with and reuse our digital cultural heritage.
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
As a result of this project, the library will adobt the IIIF protocol. This adoption will significantly improve the discoverability, accessibility, and interoperability of the digital collection for all end-users, from casual browsers to researchers working with large text corpora. Membership in the IIIF Consortium and community will further the library’s efforts to promote and popularise our digital cultural heritage internationally. Additionally, transitioning to the IIIF protocol will bring forth software and hardware upgrades as the new portal will be modular, built on standardised, open-source, and freeware components.
Upon completion, DIGAR will become a nationwide service empowering literature and heritage enthusiasts to access, reuse, and enrich our digital cultural heritage.
The UX/UI design and prototyping of the new discovery and delivery portal was funded by the Ministry of Culture.
The DIGAR development project is co-funded by the European Union.
The National Library of Estonia participates in the digitisation project EODOPEN, co-funded by the EU Creative Europe programme. The project runs from 2019 to 2024 and covers 15 partner libraries from 11 European countries (Austria, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Portugal, Sweden and Estonia). The project is led by the University Library of Innsbruck, Austria.
Project Objectives
The EODOPEN project focuses on bringing European 20th and 21st century digitally-hidden stacks to the public forefront by directly engaging with communities in the selection, digitisation and dissemination processes while at the same time reinforcing the capacity of library staff with regards to dealing adequately with rights clearance questions. The project will broaden the scope to alternative delivery formats in order to reach an even larger audience, especially adequate formats for users of mobile devices as well as blind or visually impaired users.
Target groups
young people (including literature recommended by schools)
Airi-Ulrike Lillevälja
Project Manager
the National Library of Estonia [email protected]
In the course of the project, a Library Management Dashboard will be created, which operates on unified principles for analysing and managing the activities of Estonian libraries. This dashboard will consolidate the necessary data on the network of Estonian libraries and enable libraries to efficiently and promptly collect, process, and exchange data. Analysing the data allows libraries to improve the existing services, develop new services, assess the use of their collections and ensure they meet requirements, understand the impact of their activities, and compare themselves with other libraries both in Estonia and in other countries, etc.
In collaboration with libraries, an attractive, user-friendly and simple e-service has been designed that meets expectations and accessibility requirements.
The Management Dashboard offers the necessary services to libraries centrally from one place; the services are accessible and enable self-service, and the data is cross-usable.
A toolkit for decision-makers will be developed. Each library will have a personal management dashboard.
The Management Dashboard is integrated with libraries and other key systems to ensure that data exchange is prompt and as automatic as possible.
Various logical and arithmetic checks have been applied to improve data quality both during data loading and manual entry.
The Management Dashboard can be used both via the web interface and by querying data via API. Data visualisation tools are also used in the web interface.
The Management Dashboard also provides a solution for consolidating publication statistics data.
The data is published as linked open data.
Development partner: ADM Interactive OÜ
The planned end of the project is 31 July 2025.
The environment must be ready for data entry already in January 2025.
The development project is co-financed by the European Union.
Completed projects
The innovation project “Books on the Move” (2019-2022) aimed to provide a modern technological solution for library lending services. The goal of the project was to connect the collections of Estonian libraries into a single simple search that operates on existing online-catalogues and allows users to order desired books to their home from anywhere in Estonia. The idea of the project was as simple as it was ambitious: to make the physical book collections across different Estonian libraries and library systems discoverable in one easy search, and to enable quick delivery of the desired book to the user.
As a result of the project, a user-friendly environment called My Library (MIRKO) was created, which can be accessed from both computers and smart devices. Upon finding the desired book, the user simply clicks “order”, without having to consider the location of the book. An algorithm picks the most fitting, most expedient copy across all participating library holdings and library systems. With the help of our logistics partner, the book is then delivered to the user, either to a postal locker, local store or directly to the indicated address. The environment enables users to search for literature, order books to a selected location, track the progress of their orders, receive notifications about book arrivals and return deadlines, recommend books to a friend, transfer a borrowed book to a friend, and use many other features. A separate management environment was created for libraries to handle orders. With the new service, the publications acquired by libraries have become mobile, and the entire Estonian library network has become the reader’s local library.
The “Books on the Move” project received support from the innovation-promoting procurement programme of the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency. The amount of support was €333,332.50.
The countrywide e-lending is an environment for borrowing e-publications that assembles e-books, e-newspapers, e-magazines, and audiobooks. The service is free to use for all people with an Estonian ID and is accessible from both smart devices and web browsers. The new service is intended to be linked with the needs of educational institutions to support the learning process. Additionally, the environment will be accessible to people with special needs, including, for example, the blind and visually impaired. In this environment, users can receive, store, and borrow e-publications, and the service is usable regardless of the availability of the internet.
Reasons for developing the e-lending service:
A pan-European study with a total of 2,500 participants, which included the National Library of Estonia and the University of Tartu Library, revealed that people want to borrow e-books from libraries.
Nearly 90 percent of respondents considered the ability to download the book to their own device important.
Until MIRKO became available, there was no countrywide and unified free system for lending e-publications in Estonia.
The National Library of Estonia launched e-lending at the beginning of 2023 and it has been available to all Estonian people since 14 February 2023, through the web environment or via an app. The MIRKO platform has been developed by Netgroup.
The analysis phase will determine the exact project timetable, solution architecture, profitability and opportunities for creating automatic open data support and open data packages. As a result, an analysis about new services of the digital archive is created and a readiness arises to acquire and introduce all the necessary software components in the next phase of the project.
The wider benefits of the development project are as follows:
Estonia’s printed heritage will be available to use digitally for future generations. The project will improve the quality of the National Library’s digital archive service, allowing the proper preservation and convenient use of its objects for other memory institutions, researchers and a wide range of readers.
The National Library digital archive provides storage services for memory institutions. The new digital archive creates conditions for other memory institutions to preserve their materials in the National Library digital archive.
Simpler and more convenient administration. The new digital archive will be simpler to administer, reducing the amount of manual labour.
Possibility to interface new services. The new digital archive allows new services to be interfaced through APIs, thus, it is possible to reuse the digital archive objects in other information systems.
Facilitates the development of Estonian science. The new digital archive creates a prerequisite for conducting research (incl. data and text mining, digital humanities, data science) based on the text corpora in the digital archive.
Supports the conservation of viable Estonian cultural space. The availability of literature, graphics, periodicals and archived websites published in Estonian or related to Estonia will improve.
The project consists of two phases: the business and detail analysis (starting autumn 2018) and the development project (expected to start in 2020). Eva-Maria Artus is the project manager. This project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
The project is part of a project launched by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and the Government Office to develop and use artificial intelligence.
Problem Statement The National Library of Estonia receives questions / information requests daily. These questions often have recurring patterns and themes that we use too much human resources to answer. The National Library of Estonia receives about 14,000 e-mails with questions a year. As a result of the project, a prototype of an application based on artificial intelligence will be created. This will be capable of sorting received questions by topic and answering basic questions with recurring patterns on its own.
Project Objective To develop a solution that would enable the National Library to provide information services to users 24/7; to save resources because answering basic requests will be replaced with a technological process based on artificial intelligence.
Project Output
The purpose of creating the prototype is to confirm that the basic project is feasible and applicable.
The project covers the period from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2020.
The project is being developed by Intelligent Technologies OÜ.
The project council of the National Library of Estonia is coordinating the project: Katre Riisalu, Karmen Linask, Kristel Veimann.
Business project manager: Mare Kurvet
IT project manager: Agnes Kutsar (RMIT)
The project for creating a prototype chatbot based on artificial intelligence is funded by the European Regional Development Fund measure “Conducting Preliminary, Business and Usability Analyses of the Development of Public Services – 18.05.2015–01.07.2020”.
Pursuant to the National Library of Estonia Act, the main task of the National Library is the collection, long-term preservation and making accessible of all publications published in Estonia and their registration in the database of Estonian National Bibliography (ERB).
All publications in the National Library collections are described and tagged. In order to do that, qualified personnel will examine the publication and determine the tags that reflect the content of the publication. When determining tags, the help of artificial intelligence or algorithms is not used which, first, has created the idea that employee-created tags to reflect the content might not be the most suitable or logical to the user, second, an activity based on this methodology may not always produce the most objective and accurate result, third, creating tags in this way is too resource-intensive for the library (i.e. the state), finally, it is difficult to ensure that all publications on the same topic are always tagged consistently.
Problem statement. Tagging items is a resource-intensive process. It is based on the knowledge and assessments of an individual. Therefore the consistency of tags is not always guaranteed for different editions of the same publication. It is a manual job.
Project objective. To create a prototype based on machine learning and artificial intelligence that will help automate the content analysis and tagging of publications; to support the development of Estonian language technologies; to reduce expenses, increase speed and ensure the objectivity and consistency of tags.
Project output. A detail analysis and a prototype that can analyse and automatically tag the content of a publication when the full text is available.
The project consists of two parts: preparing the detail analysis report and creating the prototype.
Project duration: September 2019 – May 2020 Project manager: Jane Makke
This project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
Pursuant to the National Library of Estonia Act, the main task of the National Library is the collection, long-term preservation and making accessible of all national publications published in Estonia and their registration in the database of Estonian National Bibliography (ERB). In addition to national publications, the data of other publications published abroad in Estonian and by Estonian authors is also registered in the National Bibliography, as well as translations of the works by Estonian authors published abroad and publications about Estonians or the Estonian language. All publications are registered in the National Bibliography, irrespective of whether they are published in printed form, on any other physical medium or electronically online.
Problem statement. The data model that the National Bibliography is based on and the technical solutions providing the National Bibliography service are obsolete. They do not ensure the necessary protection of National Bibliography data and do not allow flexible interfacing with other information systems to ensure the availability of the data of Estonian publications in machine-readable form to other libraries and partners. They also do not support the reuse and cross-usage of data outside the library sector. The current information system does not allow the automation of service processes. Therefore, providing the service requires manual labour in places where machines could do it in the future.
Project objective. The aim of the project is to create the most cost-effective and optimal business model and solution for providing the national bibliography service in the future. The project will ensure greater end-user satisfaction with the service and will help increase reuse and cross-usage of national bibliographic data.
Project output. The result of the project is a business analysis of the service. The business analysis results in a mapping and analysis of the current situation that describes the business model and processes related to the current service provision, the expenses and management model, related e-services and functionalities, the users, parties and interfaces. In addition, data quality and security are analysed. The business analysis will point out significant risks and bottlenecks of the current service and evaluate the sustainability of the current arrangement of the service. In addition it will show user satisfaction with the service and what their actual needs and expectations are for the service.
The project is divided into three parts:
description and analysis of the current situation;
the design of the future business service and the general description of the technical solution;
technical specification document for the detail analysis tender.
Project duration: August 2019 – March 2020 Project manager: Jane Makke
This project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
