The Czech Ministry of Culture has prepared a broad concept covering digitisation, long-term preservation of and access to the entire national cultural heritage in digital form. One national portal will provide users with access to Czech national cultural heritage covering library documents, archival documents, museum collections, architectonic monuments, performing arts and media:

The National Digital Library (in Czech Národní digitální knihovna) covers an important part of national cultural heritage, since - as demonstrated in the picture above - library documents are among cornerstones of the whole cultural context. The National Digital Library operates in the broader context of the Czech Digital Library.

The figure below illustrates the concept of the Czech Digital Library. Let us start in the middle of the diagram. The centre, or heart, of the whole system called the National Digital Library contains selected digital objects as the core national cultural heritage. These digital objects intended for long-term preservation are digitised analogue documents or born digital materials. They are produced within three large national projects funded by the Ministry of Culture.

• Manuscriptorium (http://www.manuscriptorium.com) is a system for collecting and making accessible on the internet information on historical book resources, linked to a virtual library of digitised documents.
  
• The Kramerius (http://kramerius.nkp.cz) project focuses on the preservation of and accessibility to ëmoderní periodicals, books and other documents in danger of acid paper degradation.
  
• WebArchiv (http://www.webarchiv.cz) is a digital archive of Czech web resources that are collected with the aim of their long-term preservation.
  

Documents owned or produced by any Czech library, museum, archives or other institution can be selected to be part of the National Digital Library. The digitisation, creation of metadata and preservation of these selected documents are funded by the Ministry of Culture.

Institutions with digital objects not selected for the National Digital Library will also be invited to deposit their data in the Central Digital Repository at their request, but additional funding will be required from other ministries (depending on the different subject areas), regions or institutions. Digital data are produced also by other institutions, but these institutions are not interested in depositing the data in the Central Repository. Digital data stored in local repositories built by such institutions and funded by various ministries, local authorities, individual institutions and corporations can be integrated under the umbrella of national, or international, portals and other integrating tools if those agencies adhere to agreed standards.

Several national grant projects made it possible for our digitisation projects to start in the early 1990s and for our website to begin to be archived in 2000. As we greatly respect international standards, all our results can be easily integrated into miscellaneous portals (TEL, EUROPEANA, etc.). Despite being a small country, the Czech Republic has earned a worldwide recognition for its long tradition and remarkable results in the area of digital preservation: in 2005, the National Library of the Czech Republic was awarded the first UNESCO/Jikji Memory of the World Prize for its contribution to the preservation and accessibility of our documentary heritage. However, digitisation and digital preservation in our country are significantly hindered by a lack of money, slowing digitisation and preventing us from building a truly trusted (and certified) digital repository.

The situation should improve dramatically very soon. The Czech Ministry of Culture and the Czech Government have accepted the National Digital Library as a strategic priority and candidate for European funding under the umbrella of the Integrated Operational Programme ñ IOP (Smart Administration).

The National Library of the Czech Republic along with the Moravian Library in Brno have prepared an ambitious project with two main goals:
- Acceleration of digitisation (two digitisation centres in Prague and Brno, mass digitisation)
- Long-term preservation of and access to digital objects (a trusted Central Digital Repository located at two geographically-separated places: Prague and Brno).

Let us draw your attention to some impressive numbers: the core of the Czech national cultural heritage (documents published in the country in and since 1801 + historical documents until 1800 stored in Czech libraries) form approximately 1.2 million documents, that is 350 million pages. Their digitisation at the current rate would take 300 years, during which many of the documents printed on acid paper and/or highly used would become so fragile that their digitisation would not be possible and our country would lose an important part of its national cultural heritage. The project will make it possible to digitise these 350 million pages within 20 years. The most fragile or highly used documents (mostly newspapers) should be digitised during a five-year project between 2009 and 2014.

The results of the project will be::

• Digitisation of the documents published in and since 1801: 26 million pages 
• WebArchive: harvesting and archiving of 4 billion files 
  
• Trusted digital repository, 600 TB of raw digital data in one locality (certified by internal as well as external audits)
  
• User-friendly and customised access to digital content for various users.
  

The total budget of the project should be 12 million EUR (85% from European funding and 15% from co-funding).