Created in 2006, BNDigital has as main objective to preserve the cultural memory and provide wide access to the information contained in its heritage.
Source of Excellence for information and research, BNDigital increases its public daily by offering a high technology system, which facilitates the consultations and distinguishes itself for the user-friendly interface, for the quality of images, search accuracy and speed.
Librarians, historians, archivists and digitizers, responsible for the creation, cataloging and spreading of the digital content, compose the BNDigital interdisciplinary team. The work is divided into three stages: capture, technical processing and national and international cooperation projects.
The capture from the original document or from the microfilm, is made without damages to the heritage, in a modern and well-equipped Laboratory of Digitalization. The first step is the creation of a high quality master archive, which is stored in a safe environment at the Brazilian National Library (BN) data processing center. Derived images of this archive are made in diverse formats, which are provided for consultation through the Internet.
At the technical treatment phase, the digital object is catalogued and described, both in Portuguese and English, by a set of 15 attributes, following the International Standard Dublin Core, in order to allow cooperation with other digital libraries of the whole world.
To fulfill the purpose of extending the access to digitalized documents, BNDigital keeps national and international partnerships with other virtual libraries, for which its heritage is provided. This interoperation is possible thanks to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol accession for Metadata Harvesting - OAI-PMH, which allows information interchange between institutions.
In the national scope these partnerships are settled by means of the Brazilian Virtual Memory Network, through legal instrument of cooperation, seeking to fulfill the institutions partners needs.
In recognition to the quality of work developed, BNDigital was invited to participate in the Worldwide Digital Library as a founder member, being part of its Executive Board. Other international partners are Gallica - which is the National Digital Library of France -, the National Library of Argentina and the Digital Library of the Ibero-american Heritage.
Meet some of the criteria used for the digitization policy formulation:
- to be in public domain (or to have the title holder authorization);
- selection for the guard areas;
- rarity and uniqueness;
- users demands;
- thematic selections;
- to be catalogued/identified or not;
- collaborative potential;
- preservation state.