About

From now on thou­sands of dig­i­tized im­ages of texts, maps and art ob­jects from the col­lec­tions of cul­tural and sci­en­tific her­itage owned by Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Li­brary are freely ac­ces­si­ble on a new web site of Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions. The web site pro­vides an op­por­tu­nity to browse and search for dig­i­tal copies of doc­u­ments from the rare book, man­u­script, graphic art and pho­tog­ra­phy col­lec­tions ded­i­cated for stud­ies, re­search and cul­tural ed­u­ca­tion. The web­site also con­tains in­for­ma­tion on the na­tional and in­ter­na­tional digi­ti­sa­tion ini­tia­tives and pro­jects car­ried out by Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Li­brary.

Paper restoration and bookbinding

Com­pared to work­shops of book restora­tion in other Lithuan­ian li­braries, the ear­li­est ap­pear­ance of doc­u­ment restora­tion tra­di­tion hap­pened in Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Li­brary. For more than 50 years the li­brary re­stores unique man­u­scripts and rare doc­u­ments from li­brary col­lec­tions that must be pre­served for the fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. This re­spon­si­ble task de­mands the high­est of qual­i­fi­ca­tions, di­verse knowl­edge (his­tory, arts, chem­istry, mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and oth­ers), and a base for tech­ni­cal re­search.

Most of the doc­u­ments from the old col­lec­tions of Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Li­brary are hand­writ­ten or printed on pa­per. Con­sid­er­ing that pa­per is a sen­si­tive or­ganic ma­te­r­ial, it is very im­por­tant to en­sure suit­able stor­age con­di­tions of the doc­u­ments as to stop the process of de­cay and de­cline of the said doc­u­ments and the in­for­ma­tion stored therein. These videos will show the main meth­ods to re­store pa­per and bind­ings.

Digitisation

Vil­nius Uni­ver­sity Li­brary is one of the first mem­ory in­sti­tu­tions in the coun­try to start digi­tis­ing ob­jects of doc­u­men­tary cul­tural her­itage sig­nif­i­cant to both Lithua­nia and the world. With this goal in mind Digi­ti­sa­tion De­part­ment was founded in the Li­brary, which is now part of Doc­u­men­tal Her­itage Preser­va­tion Di­vi­sion. This way VU Li­brary be­came an ac­tive par­tic­i­pant in na­tional and in­ter­na­tional pro­jects aim­ing to pre­serve cul­tural her­itage in the dig­i­tal space, which en­sure the ac­ces­si­bil­ity of doc­u­men­tary her­itage stored in the Li­brary to every user.