Published on 17 January 2017
The exchange of experiences and the cooperation between Norway and the Czech Republic are among the additional values of the project. This is why in every stage of the project, journeys to Prague and to Kristiansand, the seat of our partner organization Stiftelsen Arkivet, are planned. At the beginning of 2017, many of us set off for another personal meeting in the south of Norway, the port city of Kristiansand.
The project activities are always divided among the staff of the National Library and the colleagues from the Stiftelsen Arkivet. For every output, it is always defined who the primary responsibility is assigned to. The second team provides their opinions and comments on the work of the other team and prepares factual material and otherwise assists in the implementing of a task. Our meetings are important for our work, as they provide us with the chance to express our ideas and to clarify what we must do to complete an activity. We also identify, who can provide what and express possible limitations, agreeing on the strategy to deal with them.
It became a tradition that each workshop is opened with a presentation of the principle project realizer, Tomáš Foltýn, who always summarizes what we have done since our last meeting and outlines the workshop’s programme. In the first part of the latest lecture, he mentioned that we were working concurrently on activities relating to extension of the project and the activities within the Bilateral Cooperation Fund. He informed our colleagues, for example, about the fact that we have already managed to catalogue 15,698 books, with the works still continuing. He pointed out that articles about our project had been published in the media and that new activities and achievements were publicized online.
Subsequently, our colleagues, Gro Kvanvig and Mirjam Kristensen informed us about how the preparations for an educational programme were proceeding. The educational programme is aimed at college and university students and will take place in several places in Norway and the Czech Republic. Our promotion video will be used as an introduction to the educational programme. After the initial introduction, students will be divided into five groups. Each group will work with one story. The students will be given initial information about one person and within team discussions, they will consider two possible continuations of the story of the given person. Students will need to think about the period and the historical context, to consider possible motivations of the people involved and the historical events, and to decide which of the conclusions of the story is most likely. At the end of the workshop, it will be revealed whether they were right or not and they will be given the necessary information to finish the story. Our colleagues have prepared a website which will provide the necessary information about the individual stories. The website will be available on tablets used by every group.
In the second Billateral Cooperation Fund initiative, the Czech part of the team was to create a video about the project. The making of the video is described in detail in this article. We showed our Norwegian colleagues the still unfinished version of the video. The following presentation also summarizes the making of the video.
After that, we informed our colleagues about our cooperation with the students of the Cabinet of Library and Information Science in Brno, who, within the previous activity, created multimedia profiles dedicated to the stories of the original owners of the books stored in the Reserve Fonds.
A short part concerned with administration followed. We used the personal meeting to plan in detail the realization of educational programmes, which will take place in March 2017, first in Norway and then in the Czech Republic. Gro Kvanvig informed us about the suggested schedule and together, we clarified how the meetings will be organized and the individual responsibilities. After that, Tomáš Foltýn gave information about the schedule for the week in the Czech Republic. Finally, we discussed participation at the professional conference in Paris, where Gro Kvanvig is giving a lecture and Tomáš Foltýn together with the project historian, Marcela Strouhalová, are providing the presentation on the project in the poster section.