The National Library at a Crossroads: The Digital Content Revolution and its Consequences

Abstract

This article identifies a number of challenges facing national libraries all over the world as digitally-born materials replace the physical antecedents that have been well known to us for centuries, and it describes how the Royal Library of Denmark is responding to these challenges. The author argues that if we want to preserve the digitally-born part of cultural heritage and knowledge production in the future, these problems have to be solved. We are running out of time if we are to avoid the loss of data and cultural heritage in the coming decades, as indeed happened on the web in the 1990s.