The document summarizes the results of the Access IT Plus project in the Republic of Srpska - BiH. It discusses the development of a digital library with 20,000 objects contributed by three cultural institutions and hosted by the National and University Library of the Republic of Srpska. It also discusses the promotion of the digital library, online training courses translated into Serbian that have been completed by 47 users, and challenges faced in standardizing metadata and ingesting content into Europeana.

1. Summarizing results of
Access IT Plus in
Republic of Srpska - BiH
Dalibor Pančić
National and University Library of the Republic of
Srpska

2. Digital library
Building on the existing basis of
Access IT + Project we developed a
digital library including 20 000
objects has been
developed/established by NUL RS
working in partnership with Bijeljina
Public Library and Museum of
Republic of Srpska, and it is hosted
by National and University Library of
the Republic of Srpska.
Three cultural institutions have so far
contributed content or metadata to
the digital library.
The (content or metadata) is
aggregated by NUL RS.

3. Promotion and usage
The target audience(s) for the digital library is/are reasearchers
and scholars.
In order to promote the digital library service to them,
dissemination activities including presentations, TV and
newspapers interviews have been carried out.
Current usage statistics for the library are 35 000 visits per year.
Initial user assessments of the value of the service, carried out
by NUL RS, show that most of our users are satisfied with
digital library and they would like to see more content
available, especially content that is copyrighted, not living in
public domain.
All the data were gathered through direct user interviews by
phone and emial in National and University Library of the
Republic of Srpska.

4. “Православље”

5. “Nezavisne novine”
Daily Newspaper

6. Online training
All topics in the online courses
prepared by PSNC have
been translated into
Serbian language.
The course is hosted by
National and University
Library of the Republic of
Srpska and was launched
on 11.03.2013.
To date 7823 people have
registered for the course(s).
47 have completed it so far.
Certificates for those
completing the course have

7. PMB meeting Banja Luka

8. Feedback
User feedback on the courses shows that levels of satisfaction are
pretty high. Most of our users would rate courses 8/10 and the
biggest issue they had was the duration and extent of courses.
Also, there were some issues regarding translation of technical
terms to Serbian language.
A competence centre has been established involving personnel
from the NUL RS. Four staff of the competence centre have
been trained by NUL RS.
The future role of the competence centre is seen as center for
coordination and standard evaluation in the Republic of Srpska.
Likewise, NUL RS is to become the Regional aggregator for
metadata of cultural institutions in Republic of Srpska.

9. Challenges encountered
The following have been the main barriers to progress
encountered in Republic of Srpska.
Our main barrirer was normalization and standardization of
existing metadata. Certain cultural institutions did not show too
much interest in sharing their content, mostly due to their
internal legal limitiations. Also, for some of the content we had
to troubleshoot copyright issues.
One of the biggest problems was Europeana itself. Europeana did
not show any interest in ingesting metadata from our digital
library, although we standardized our metadata and adapted it
to ESE standard. The fact that we have signed agreement with
them and mediation of certain partners from Access IT Plus
Project was not worthwile.

10. Overcoming Challenges
Issues related to normalization,
standaradization, copyright were
solved.
Some initatives have been started,
and progress has been achived
related to opening access to
content from Cultural institutions
of Republic of Srpska.
Regarding problems with
Europeana we tried every
possible solution we could think
of but problem still remaind. The
main problem is double
standards from their side.
Europeana does not want us to
become Regional aggregator,
although we asked that
numerous times.

11. Future steps
Next and future steps to ensure sustainability and further progress
will be adding more content to digital library, involving more
cultural institutions in process of digitization and conecting with
WorldCat and other metadata agregators, except of
Europeana.
This way we could increase number of users and visitors, promote
our cultural and touristic potential.