About the Digital Library

Our cultural heritage, stories and people are brought together in the Digital Library

The Digital Library provides access to images, documents, periodicals, books, maps, museum objects, paintings, sheet music, films, audio and video recordings collected by Latvia’s archives, museums, libraries, organisations, communities and individuals.

Anyone can search and find answers on any topic within the content of over 3.8 million digital objects in the Digital Library.

WHO WE ARE

The Digital Library brings together content from over 500 partner collections from Latvia and around the world. The National Library of Latvia incorporates digital content in the Digital Library and manages the Digital Cultural Heritage platform.

We are all part of the Digital Library and work according to these few principles

Illustrator Toms Vilītis

Manifesto

CONTENT

The content of the Digital Library can be grouped into five categories - text, images, video, audio recordings and objects

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Digital Library collections

The Digital Library collections are created by specialists and experts in their respective fields, whose specially selected materials allow quick and easy access to the content of the Digital Library, for example, the construction of the Ķegums Hydropower Plant, drawings and bookplates created by Latvian and foreign authors, the history of the Riga Circus, the Gulbene local history collection, a collection on Jāzeps Vītols, and other topics.

Discover

The "Discover" section contains stories by experts in their fields, educational resources, instructions for using the digital collections and resources, guidelines for digitising and preserving our cultural heritage, and other information for users and members of the Digital Library.

The Digital Library provides direct access links to digital collections, exhibitions and valuable digital resources of Latvia's cultural heritage.

A collaborative effort

Content creation, long-term management, preservation and online accessibility are the responsibility of all Digital Library partners. The partner who is custodian of the original content selects the material to be digitised, ensures the quality of the digitisation, creates the metadata and negotiates with the author how the work will be available in the Digital Library.

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THE DIGITAL LIBRARY SOLUTION

The Digital Library brings together the digital content of cultural heritage in the form of a single solution and helps users to search and find information in one place, learn about related values and content holders, offers trusted sources of information and quality opportunities for discovering content.

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The platform

The Digital Library is the most visible part of the Digital Cultural Heritage platform and the digital space of Latvia's cultural heritage which consists of:

Illustrator Toms Vilītis

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In 2015, the first unified "Digital Cultural Heritage Development Strategy" for archives, libraries and museums was developed in Latvia, marking a much closer cooperation between cultural heritage institutions than ever before. This provided the opportunity to apply for funding from the European Regional Development Fund for the development of a national digital library and a unified digital cultural heritage platform. From 2017 to 2022, the National Library of Latvia, together with the National Archives of Latvia, the State Inspection for Heritage Protection and the Cultural Information Systems Centre implemented projects titled: "Digitisation of Cultural Heritage Content (Phase 1)" and "Digitisation of Cultural Heritage Content (Phase 2)", which resulted in the development of the Digital Library. The Digital Library was opened on 26 October 2023.