UT Library calls for suggestions for the digitisation of books and learning materials

University of Tartu Library is asking students, researchers and lecturers to suggest which books and learning materials, written by Estonian authors, should be digitised in the first order. Digitisation will be carried out under the four-year-long European project EODOPEN, aiming at making 15 000 texts from the 20th and 21st centuries digitally accessible to all in the digital format.

Elena Sipria-Mironov, the UT Library project manager and one of the EODOPEN project leaders, said that the project, which was launched in the end of the previous year has proved to be a necessity right now. “The crisis situation has shown us the clear direction for our future progress. The more different learning materials and books we can make accessible to students and researchers, the wider are the possibilities of using them for studying and doing research under whichever conditions there may be. The use of digital materials and the need for them is ever increasing.”

UT Library has already made a list of materials to be digitised, based on user statistics, but suggestions from students, researchers and lecturers are very welcome. “As our aim is to make accessible mostly books by Estonian authors from the 20th and 21st centuries, we are paying particular attention to the problems of copyrights”, said Sipria-Mironov about the digitising process. “We will closely monitor the free use of digitised materials in order to not  violate the legal interests of the copyright owners. But we very much hope that the authors and publishers would realise the need for digitisation and that they would grant us their approval as soon as possible. In such cases we can immediately start digitisation.”

Suggestions and proposals can be submitted on the webpage: https://utlib.ut.ee/en/eodopen

All digitised materials will be uploaded to the UT repository of electronic materials DSpace.