Keynote: Digitizing Ghent's Scientific Library

The scientific university library in Ghent is gaining world fame after putting digital scans of its cultural heritage collection online. Sylvia van Peteghem, Ghent’s chief librarian, ignored the critics and agreed to a scanning deal with Google. Three years on, the scans have proved that digitization of scientific books is a success.

Open access was an important asset for the library team. That is why in 2007 the university partnered with the Google Book Search Program.

This meant 200,000 copyright free books were being digitized and became available for free on line.

In this presentaion Van Peteghem and her team will explain how important this project was for the university, the academic community and the wider public as a whole.

They are no strangers to Github, RDF and semantic web and will explain how their project is linked to the Drupal passion. 

About the speaker

Sylvia Van Peteghem has been working in the iconic Ghent University Book Tower (Boekentoren) since 1983. She started in the ephemera-collection of the Special Collections Department and got fascinated with the 19th Century collection. In October 2000, she was appointed as Chief Librarian of the Ghent University Library. The library is part of the research department of the University of Ghent and its mission is facilitating open knowledge creation. 

Foto: Boekentoren - bibliotheek by Pieter Morlion, on Flickr