Our Story
The National Bibliographic Office (NBO) was set up in September 2015 as a Directorate within Malta Libraries. The aim of the NBO is to ensure the application of standards in cataloguing work leading to an establishment of a local authoritative source. To this end, the NBO creates bibliographic records of all the publications submitted under legal deposit at the National Library of Malta. These records are then published annually as the Malta’s National Bibliography.
The National Library of Malta has a digitisation programme intended to preserve material in its holdings which is too fragile or valuable to be handed out to the public. Additionally, through its daily operations, the library collects and collates curatorial data on its holdings. The NBO makes such work accessible to the public by creating records attached to the digital images of files on Malta Libraries’ portal. The service is called DigiVault and is accessible via www.digivault.maltalibraries.gov.mt. The metadata contained within this portal is re-used by the NBO in collaborative projects beyond the entity, such as Europeana.
The NBO has been entrusted with the management of the off-site storage repositories of the National Library. This reflects one of the greatest challenges that the NBO faces, namely the retrospective cataloguing of all the National Library’s collections.