About us
Goals
The National Digital Library (NDL) aims to offer online, worldwide and free access to digitized manuscript and printed works – books, serials, iconography, cartography or music – held in the collections of the National Library of Portugal, the Évora Public Library and also, to a certain extent, the Ajuda Library, the former Portuguese Royal Library.
In this context, BND's main priority is to promote heritage collections, democratizing access to them by serving an increasingly vast community of users while contributing to preserve the original materials, especially the oldest, rarest or most fragile, as well as taking opportunities to digitize content for cultural or scientific projects, at a community, national or international level.
Content
The resources made available by the NDL are mostly works in the public domain, that is, with no copyright restrictions, that can be freely used for any purpose, without the need for authorization. Additionally, NDL may include content that is still protected by copyright, in this case duly marked as such and available only on the National Library of Portugal internal network.
Current projects
The most important project currently underway is the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), which aims to digitise and publish 20 million images from the collections of the National Library of Portugal and Évora Public Library between 2022 and 2025. In selecting the resources to be digitised, priority is being given to manuscripts, printed rare books and microfilms. Public presentation of the project (Dec 2021) available here.
Access and functionalities
Access to the resources can be made by the NDL search system, through the National Library Online Catalog or by browsing the different collections. It is also possible to filter search results by date, country of publication, type of document and rights, among others. When consulting digital objects, the NDL provides a set of functionalities such as selecting from different formats, downloading, comparing items, browsing tables of contents or keyword searching in documents with optical character recognition.
Content aggregation for international dissemination
NDL promotes the international dissemination of digital content from Portuguese libraries, through RNOD – the National Registry of Digital Objects, which aggregates and distributes metadata from more than 40 institutions to international portals such as Europeana, the Digital Library of Ibero-American Cultural Heritage, the Luso-Brazilian Digital Library, or the World Digital Library.
Persistent identifiers
All NDL resources can be referenced through persistent identifiers which warrant the uniqueness and permanence of their web addresses, at the object level (e.g. a book), for each of the available formats (e.g. jpg, pdf, IIIF or HTML), as well as for each of each component parts (e.g. a page).
Open data
All NDL metadata, as well as RNOD metadata, are available as open data sets, in various formats (RDFXML, JSON and TURTLE), through the OPENDATA.bnportugal.pt portal, which allows their free reuse.
Licenses
All NDL resources are provided with a rights’ status. Works already in the public domain are assigned the Public Domain mark and can be used freely. NDL metadata is released under a CC0 (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication) license, so it can be used and reused without restrictions.
