The future of library digitalization
Digitization of libraries in Serbia, which began a decade ago through participation in European projects, has brought us significant results for the National Library (NBS) and the University Library "Svetozar Markovic" (UBSM) in Belgrade, but it also must become a regular model of conducting business in other library institutions, as it was said at the stand of the EU Delegation and EU Info Centre at the Book Fair on October 28th.
Deputy Director of the NBS and UBSM Tamara Butigan and Adam Sofronijević presented the current digitization projects that would not have been possible without European support, and they also pointed out a series of plans for the future which include, among other things, resolving one of the most burning issues of the academic community and society in general - plagiarism of scientific works.
According to Sofronijević, special software would compare a certain text with structures of other texts, which are a potential source of plagiarism.
The bigger the structure of digitalized texts to be compared with is- the higher is the chance to determine whether it is plagiarism or not. The problem is, he added, that sometimes texts written in English language are being translated to Serbian language and plagiarized, which then makes it very difficult to determine.
NBS is participating in European digitization projects for more than ten years, which helped reach the necessary standards in this area, said Tamara Butigan, adding that the European digital library Europeana currently holds 67,500 digitized objects from various institutions from Serbia.
(SEEcult.org)
