Peter Krantz, CIO at Sweden’s national library, the Kungliga Biblioteket (KB), constantly asks himself how citizens can be served better today while preserving a nation’s cultural heritage in a format that will be accessible decades from now.
Krantz was appointed as the KB’s first CIO three years ago following a major restructure which saw the library’s IT operations integrated from various departments into a single IT organisation. Since then, the library’s focus has been on driving the interoperability and usability of digital services and the openness of data.
“ The national library has worked with free information and building knowledge in society for many years,” he said. “I wanted to be part of a journey to see if we can bring more information to citizens and make people more focused on getting actual facts into discussions in society.
“The KB has done some great things over the years. It has been working with open data and has done a lot of work around usability, but it was unevenly spread around departments and projects. Now we have a shared vision of what we want to achieve and how to do it.”
What attracted Krantz to the KB was the challenge of introducing modern operations into a 355-year-old organisation.
