The next 10 years of the Slovak National Library

Abstract

When I became Director General in 2012, the Slovak National Library was on the brink of a huge digitisation project that aimed to digitise all (or at least most) Slovak-related printed cultural heritage materials from the library’s collection in the years (or decades) to come. Then the mission was clear: to facilitate the transition of a traditional national library of the 20th century into the digital era. Now, a few years after its successful implementation, digitisation has become an integral part of the national library’s routine workflows in virtually all library processes, from acquisition, through bibliography and cataloguing, to the patron services and preservation. It is obvious that it was by no means the final step, rather just one of the first steps in the paradigmatic change that lies ahead of national libraries (and libraries in general) in the years to come. And it is not a distant future: the truly exciting things that can be done with the vast quantities of digitised high-quality content from the libraries are already happening or are about to happen – the digital humanities, text and data mining (with the extensive use of artificial neural networks), automated text classification, analysis and description and all the other popular buzzwords of the library world, all driven by artificial intelligence, whose role is increasing rapidly, are reality. They are part of a wider pattern in the society powered by accelerated development of technologies that start to dominate people’s lives and shape the future of the world (or at least the luckier, wealthier part of it) – things like industry 4.0 affecting the way we work and live profoundly or the internet of things, for example. And the next big thing, practical use of quantum computing with its farreaching impacts, is just around the corner. There is no way that libraries (including the national libraries), which have been an integral part of society for centuries, can remain unaffected by these developments. In