Abstract:

Dominant technology imposes a general term for an era, wrote Asa Briggs and Peter Burke: the era of the press, the age of the radio, or the television era. We do not distinguish the age of library, because they are not temporary. Libraries are timeless institutions and phenomena, and their modality, virtual library, is no longer futurist category. There is a scientific, cultural and educational necessity for development of virtual libraries, as well as the social necessity, as they transcend economic, political and national boundaries, they become catalysts for economic obstacles.
Libraries are aspiring to preserve the documentary-historical, cultural and scientific heritage, to enrich the national and global memory, to invest in intellectual development and to contribute to the reinforcement of democracy of knowledge. On the "open path" of designing global memory, libraries are active participants in solving all of the challenges of education; they contribute to the development of intellectual freedom and spread information literacy and general enlightenment. Handwritten and printed information are replaced with digital sources, whose multiplicity, organization, flexibility and distribution are considered distinctive qualities in the process of placing and timely availability of knowledge on any subject.
Wanting to be included among the university centers which provide access to, evaluation, interpretation of information and knowledge, communication with new and fresh ideas, promote and develop critical thinking, include all relevant and current materials, activate individual potential of each researcher, Faculty of Philology, as a member of the University of Belgrade, formed in 2012, for this purpose, a digital library. Digital Library of the Faculty of Philology is a completely open source for all users and it is unique in Higher Education system in Serbia. It includes all editions of Faculty of Philology, which encloses twenty-year tradition of the University of Belgrade. Digital processing of the written legacy of Serbian Nobel prize winner Ivo Andric is in progress, after which we will approach the digitization of manuscripts of poets Ivan V. Lalic, Alexandar Vuca and Desanka Maksimovic, who marked the Serbian literature of the twentieth century. This is the first digital library in Serbia that will incorporate the entire written legacy of prominent writers, and we believe that it is also one of the few in the world. This process has opened a number of questions related to the digitization of book and manuscript material, or archival material in general, as well as the issues related to its further use. Digital Library of the Faculty of Philology will be an important educational resource for all researchers and students, and will have a special significance for the development of master courses organized jointly with foreign universities.
This paper will, therefore, consider, on the basis of theoretical and empirical findings, especially those related to the digital library of the Faculty of Philology: the structure of digital libraries; the rules of digitization and the use of digital forms of published and manuscript materials, which are the subject of an entirely different library and archives usages; the importance of digital libraries in the system of Higher Education; the indispensability of digital libraries for tertiary distance education and lifelong learning.

Keywords:

Digital Library, library materials, archives, manuscripts, University, Digitization, Distance learning, Lifelong learning.