Portuguese-Brazilian Digital Library
The design of the Portuguese-Brazilian Digital Library (PBDL) started in 2014, as a result of a partnership between the National Library of Rio de Janeiro and the National Library of Portugal, with the main objective to coordinate efforts and to make available in the same access point all the digital collections of both institutions. It will be a first step to give a new dimension, relevance and visibility online to cultural content from a common language and history.
This is the first time that libraries from Portuguese speaking countries join together to make available their collections and seek to match other global initiatives.
Other objectives are:
- To collaborate actively in the transfer of knowledge in technical areas with a fast pace of evolution, in terms of standards, methodologies and technological resources of digitalization, information management and digital preservation;
- To coordinate activities to avoid digitalization duplication of the same content, in printed publications, optimizing resources; at this point, is highly relevant to Portugal the collaboration offered by the National Library Foundation (Brazil) to help in the mass digitalization of newspapers microfilm, of which BNP has more than 15 million images;
- To extend the collaborative processes to other areas of activity, such as joint production of exhibitions and cultural and technical events, strengthening institutional ties.
The project is a portal which will add automatically information of both national libraries of Brazil and Portugal, whose sum of content reaches more than 2 million documents, more than 60000 titles, corresponding to approximately 13 million images of bibliographic materials in the public domain, from all times and genres. Among them, we can find the first edition of “Os Lusíadas”, by Luís de Camões, from 1572.
After the entry into regular operation of the portal, it will begin a second phase of expansion, widening to COLUSO participants (Portuguese-Brazilian Committee for Safeguarding and Disseminating Documentary Heritage) and the other entities and projects from Portuguese libraries.
The Portuguese-Brazilian Library collection also includes works from 30 institutions of Portugal and 20 more from Brazil, including Real Gabinete de Leitura (Real Reading Office), founded by Portuguese immigrants in Rio de Janeiro, in 1837.
At this stage, it is predicted also the diversification of PBDL portal in terms of content typology, adding contextualization skills to digital collections, in an editorial area in which, in addition to dissemination of news events, it will be created files, exhibitions, essays, articles, etc. It is expected to attract around from 100000 accesses a month.
For a third phase, from 2016-17, both national libraries intend to extend the perimeter of PBDL to other Portuguese-speaking countries who wish to participate. In this phase it is expected the deepening of organizational structure and technique, and extending training and support services that make possible the cooperation from new participating countries.
Information not available