• 2016-05-09

To facilitate international cooperation with national libraries form various countries and provide citizens reading resources, National Central Library (NCL)'s Director General Shu-hsien Tseng and Deputy Director General Katarzyna Ślaska from the National Library of Poland (NLP) signed a Cooperation Agreement on May 6, 2016.

During the signing ceremony, Director General Tseng particularly donated replicas of The Annotated Poetry of Su Dongpo, a national treasure of the Republic of China that is more than 800 years old, and The Diamond Sutra which is the earliest wood block print book with dual color in the world. She also donated a copy of Taiwan wenhua rongyan (The Face of Taiwan Culture), which explores Taiwan art, plays, music, and festivals and celebrations, as well as a Taiwan-styled souvenir, to the NLP. She especially thanked General Director Tomasz Makowski and Deputy Director Katarzyna Ślaska for their support of this project, as well as the library staffs who have spent so much effort to launch the cooperation.

The National Library of Poland was established in 1928. It is Poland's most important library for research in the humanities and a primary center for archiving Polish works of literature. The library contains nearly ten million items. The NLP offers different specially designated reading areas such as general reading area, periodicals room, humanities reading area, science reading area, cartography, music, sound and audiovisual, microform, manuscripts, special collections, Polish writers reading areas. It also has an area to offer librarianship and information science to readers. The largest reading area can accommodate 296 seats. NLP's efforts and methods in the preservation and restoration of rare books left a deep impression on Director General Tseng and those traveling with her.

In her speech, Director General Tseng pointed out that the NCL has been striving to promote international cooperation with national libraries form various countries. After signing this collaborative agreement, the NCL and the NLP will provide each other with published resources on Poland and Taiwan, as well as exchange experts, knowledge, experience and technologies. Both libraries have similar holdings and experience in digitizing resources and in guiding the development of public libraries. This is beneficial in future preservation of culture, in engaging in collaborative exchanges on how to provide multimedia information services, and in increasing the cultural understanding of Taiwan and Poland by citizens of both countries. All of these possibilities outline a win-win situation that will result from this collaboration.

The National Library of Poland expanded enormous efforts in collecting and archiving works by Polish writers and the information on activities of the Polish Writers Union from 1944 to the present. In recent years, the NCL also has begun proactively acquiring manuscripts, letters, calligraphy, paintings, and pictures of famous contemporaries, which can be found in the Contemporary Celebrities' Manuscripts database. It is an important resource for patrons and scholars researching contemporary literature.

Next, the NLP has a digital library, called Polona. It has digitized many valuable holdings, including manuscripts, maps, postcards, books, pictures, and music. The NCL has created close to 60 databases of digitized ancient books, special collections, newspapers, periodicals, dissertations and theses, posters, and audiovisual materials. It has also produced digitally-themed courses and e-books that display Taiwan's cultural heritage in a lively and engaging way. In 2015, the NCL established a digitization center to begin the digitization of modern and contemporary publications and encourage authors to authorize their works to the NCL. Future plans for the NCL include creating a platform for the e-book access that can be free of charge.

The NLP is currently engaged in a National Programme for the Development of Reading, from 2016 to 2020. It is anticipated that through strengthening the role of public libraries and schools as local centers of social life, the reading conditions in Poland will be improved. The primary aim of 2016 is to purchase 26.5 million volumes/items of sociocultural resources for public libraries, such as new books, multimedia, music, maps, and periodicals.

With respect to aiding the development of public libraries, the NCL has engaged in many projects, including a four-year project that started in 2013 called the Project for Resource Integration and Development of Public Libraries, from 2013 to 2016. As of 2015, it has established four regional resource centers and eight district resource centers in the northern, central, southern, and eastern regions of Taiwan. The NCL also assisted in setting up a mechanism where experts select important books in their field as a reference catalog that public libraries can use in creating thematic collections. The NCL also guides public libraries in providing inter-regional loan services, thus allowing for a general sharing of library resources. Guidance for, visits to, and evaluations of public libraries, as well as educational training are other initiatives at NCL to augment service quality in Taiwan's public libraries. In addition, it holds various kinds of reading promotion events to improve public reading habits. These are all methods that the NLP and the NCL can discuss and share experience on.