Financing

The Kramerius open source system has already been developing since 2003, when its inception was initiated by the National Library of the Czech Republic. Library of Czech Academy of Sciences has taken part in its development from the very start and from the year 2008 it became the warranter of its advancement.

The new generation of the Kramerius system was named Kramerius 4 and just like the newer ones it has the Fedora open source repository (developed in the USA) at its core. That version was available since 2010. At the time the main source of finance for its development was the DC08P02OUK008 (Digitalized documents evidence, monitoring their processing and developing a tool for their disclosure) project of the Ministry of Culture. The same project was also used to sponsor the development of the Digitalisation Registry.

Since 2012, Kramerius was developed within the framework of a project that was sponsored by the MK ČR NAKI – DF12P01OVV002 programme (Czech Digital library and the tools for securing complex processes of digitalisation).

In 2014 the K5 version was finished, and it featured a REST API interface that makes it possible to attach other applications, including a new interface for users. That version made it possible to commence e.g. the development of mobile device clients and the development of a new web client. During 2014 the developers began to harvest data into a central installation and to create an index. The data collected in this manner are the foundation of the Czech Digital Library, the purpose of which it is to aggregate data from digital libraries across the Czech republic, to provide access to them in one place and to grant information about these documents to other aegis projects (Europeana, Knihovny.cz – the central gateway for libraries). Development funding from the MK ČR NAKI programme ended in 2015.

In 2016 the development was funded by the VISK1 programme.

The output of this year consists of two basic areas. The first is development support, including Kramerius project management at GitHub developers‘ site: https://github.com/ceskaexpedice/kramerius, communication with Kramerius users and administrators in libraries (using mailing lists kramerius@lib.cas.cz) and their technical support, source code fixes, and ongoing system updates in connection with updates and new versions of subsystems used throughout the solution (such as the Fedora repository). The second is the development of new functions, defined according to the requirements of the institutions using the Kramerius system. The transition to the new Fedora 4 repository was also analyzed to decide to use a different repository.