TKK:n kirjaston kuukausikokouksessa kuulimme Tallinnan teknillisen yliopiston kirjaston informaatikko Urve Ideonin eloisan esityksen alan nykytilanteesta Virossa. Myös naapurissa pyritään mittavaan alan automatisointiin, vaikka ongelmat ovat lukuisat.
I will tell you a bit about Estonian librarianship. At present we get young librarians from two institutions. The first is Tallinn Pedagogical University, where the department of librarianship and bibliography gives them speciality on the academic level. Since 1988 this department uses the new study plans, which pay more attention to computer and information science, library technology, computer-based information retrieval systems and databases. The second institution is Viljandi College of Culture, where library and information science education is organized on college level.
As the salary in libraries is rather low nowadays, we can't say that we have enough young well-educated people in all libraries. Fortunately there are a lot of older librarians and their experience is very important to hold our libraries in their level. But as there is rapid computer-based development in the field of information technology now, it's very important to get new specialists with such education.
ELA has its own publications:
At local level the complete library system must consist of an online catalogue as a core of this system, acquisitions and fund accounting, circulation control, collections management, data export, import and conversion, desktop publishing and local databases. Each library must detail its own structure of the system and the order of the implementation.
At national level the implementation of integrated system is based on the tasks and specialization of libraries. Two types of support centers for information system in this level will be created. These are scientific central libraries and regional public central libraries.
Scientific central libraries must be the cataloguing centers and generate databases according to the profile of the library, they must give access to Estonian and foreign databases in specified field and support interlibrary lending according to the profile. The implementation of online catalogues in scientific central libraries is the first stage in creating Estonian Union Catalog. These libraries are as follows:
There are a lot of problems in automation of Estonian libraries now: insufficient funding, limited human recources, organizational shortages. In details all the questions are more complicated than it seems at first look. But we have fixed our aims, tasks and requirements. This is already a great achievement.
From the beginning of 1991 our library has some stand-alone XT-computers. In 1992 the Swedish government gave us some money as a help for developing our library. For this money we bought some hardware and software. We have about 20 CD-ROMs and can offer them to our readers. As our university has its own network and this network is connected to Internet and in January 1993 we also connected one computer to this network and got an opportunity to retrieve Internet. But our Internet-connected computer serves also for information searching from CD-ROMs and staff-training. So we haven't had a chance to study Internet sufficiently and our readers haven't yet access to the Internet via library's computer. But we can use e-mail and this has given us the opportunity to participate in the work of discussion groups. We have studied GOPHER and practised FP, ARCHIE, VERONICA, WAIS, WWW and some library systems from different hosts. The purpose of this studying has mainly been the learning of general nature of these systems and could be named also as staff-training. We have also had an opportunity to access your library system and we had used this several times specially for our interlibrary loan department. Thank you!
Now we are creating our local Novell LAN in our main building and in 2.student hostels in Mustamäe, where our administration, cataloguing and acquisition department are situated.
I haven't yet spoken about the most difficult thing in our library this year. This was moving out from our LAI street 5 building in old town. This house was given back to the owner, an old lady, who lived all the time in Riga, but now intends to move to Tallinn. All this moving was extremely hard work and all other things suffered because of this. Now it's over and our library is situated in 7 places.
In December of this year we celebrated the 75th anniversary of our library. We had 3 events to mark this important date. The first event was our conference in September - The Integration of European Technological Libraries. We had a pleasure to meet some of you in this conference too. The second event was a festive reception in our new rooms in Mustamäe on 16 December. And the third event was on 22 December in our main building in Mustamäe. This was an afternoon for our former and present collegues to get together and tell some memories about the job in library. At present our staff is about 90 persons.