BDS: Data and innovation opening new possibilites

A Library with a Life all its Own

In the ten years since the dramatic extension of the Danish Royal Library opened, the new building, clad in Zimbabwean black granite, seems to have taken control of its own destiny. The Royal Library, however, has a long history, having been founded in 1648. This mixture of the gravitas offered by a long tradition and the energy from a new age of information technology is what makes the Library’s story so fascinating.
“We wanted the Royal Library and thereby its function as a national library to become visible to the people,” says Grethe Jacobsen, Head of Legal Deposit at Det Kongelige Bibliotek. “What we didn’t know when we opened our doors in 1999, was how this would eventually happen. Of course, we had our plans and studies, our expectations, but the building and the people who use it have often taken the library in a different direction.”

This is not surprising from a building that is, both in terms of architecture and location, breathtaking. Designed by architects Schmidt, Hammer and Lassen, the library rises above the wide sound that leads from the Baltic Sea into the heart of Denmark’s capital. The polished facets of “the Black Diamond” – as the Minister of Cultural Affairs at the time, Jytte Hilden, named it - reflect the changing moods of the water that surrounds it. Part of an even more ambitious harbour regeneration programme, the National Library links with the National Theatre, upriver, and the new Opera House, which opened in 2005. What was once the trading port driving the Danish economy is now its cultural heart, full of the bustle of art lovers, researchers, tourists, ferry buses, outdoor events, restaurants and hotels.
“When the Brazilian President paid Denmark a state visit, part of his carefully planned and timed itinerary was a visit to the Royal Library,” continues Grethe. “We waited and waited. The sun was beating down on the gathering of journalists inside.Brazilians living in Denmark waited expectantly, dressed in their finest clothes. People were looking at their watches. When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finally arrived he ignored the planned champagne reception and announced that he wanted a coffee in our café. He sat, chatted, and admired the interior. The visit had not gone to plan yet the building made it a great success.”
The Brazilian President had much to admire. The library’s interior is as engaging as its exterior. A twenty-four metre high central atrium formed by curved balconies and glass is made brighter by light-grey tiles from Portugal and light woods which give the whole building a warm, inviting feel. Research and study takes place alongside a concert-hall, exhibition galleries, café and a bookshop. “The next thing we discovered,” says Grethe, “was that students loved the place but not always in the manner we had predicted.”

As a research facility serving a nation of nearly 5.5 million inhabitants as well as international researchers, and as the University Library serving Copenhagen University, the Royal Library represents an impressive and huge resource. Its Legal Deposit department receives between 15 and 20 thousand publications per year. Its current “hard copy” resource occupies 192km of shelves and is spread across four buildings. Most items from the national collection are available within hours of a request being placed. There are numerous specialist collections, including a Judaica collection and a Resistance collection covering the years of the Nazi occupation. The library also keeps collections of newspaper cartoons going back over a hundred years. The cartoon is particularly important to Danish culture (witness the recent international crisis over depictions of the prophet Mohammed).
There is a huge national photography archive and museum which is currently being digitised and placed online. The library was a world pioneer in digitisation, beginning the process as long ago as 1993. Legal Deposit also covers materials published on the Danish Internet and a net archive, containing Internet material collected since 2005 that already exceeds 155 terabytes and would cover, if converted into shelf space, over 15,000 km.
When the new library opened in 1999 the librarians were ready for a surge of enquiries. The students came in droves, with their laptops. They spread throughout the building, not just in the areas designated, logged-on and set to work.
When asked why they don’t do such work from home or a café, the students reply was always: ‘because this is the right place, this place feels good, it’s where we want to be, where we can focus’.

Grethe takes me into the original part of the Royal Library which is joined by an elevated corridor to the hyper-modern extension, and shows me the old reading room, all marble columns, dark wooden shelves and silence. Rows of students are seated, tapping away on their laptops. “Before the new library, this was the preserve of advanced researchers and professors,” Grethe whispers, “now it belongs to the students. They simply moved in. It is always silent, a silence maintained by those using it and not imposed by librarians.”

This breaking down of barriers and the “old order” in favour of flexible usage can also be seen in the manner in which exhibitions are held in the library. Originally, the basement area was designed to house temporary exhibitions but now exhibits from current shows are to be found around the whole space. Most recently, the library has spread onto the quayside and researchers mingle with tourists at the café tables or relax on deck chairs as the river traffic passes by. The public’s ownership of the library is perhaps best exemplified through the work being undertaken on the digitisation of the library’s photographic archive and on its ambitious netarchive, which sets out to preserve a record of the Danish portion of the Internet. “Here we realised that we need the people’s help,” comments Grethe. “How do you comment on, catalogue and check the mass of material we trawl from the Internet? We required a feedback system and the use of metadata combined with the traditional cataloguing skills that form the backbone of the library.”

Grethe refers to several instances where the photographic digitisation programme has been assisted by members of the public who can correct the naming of places and people in historic images. Meanwhile the library’s extensive OCR programme invites correction from members of the public where the usually reliable imaging of documents has led to misreadings of the converted text.

“The skills and the professionalism of the modern librarian are still very much at the heart of the Royal Library,” says Grethe. “Without these skills we would have chaos but the users have an increasing role to play. As the users have become part of the life of the Library, we have also realised that accuracy has to be allied with ease of access. The extension to the National Library has taught us that a library has a life of its own, that it is a joint creation of the nation’s heritage and its people, that the strict standards required to order our knowledge are only of use if they are capable of being harnessed for the people and their future. In this respect the Black Diamond has taught us more than we ever imagined it would when it opened just over a decade ago.”