New Cultural Heritage Website in Novi Sad, Serbia

This is a new Serbian cultural site sponsored by the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Novi Sad Cultural Centre. Eastern Europe is on of the areas most needing greater access for genealogists doing research on the Internet. Sites such as this are a huge step forward in acquiring genealogically significant material on the Web. 

Novi Sad (Serbian Cyrillic: Нови Сад, is the second largest city in Serbia. From Wikipedia: Novi Sad:

The name Novi Sad means "New Plantation" (noun) in Serbian. Its Latin name, stemming from establishment of city rights, is "Neoplanta". The official names of Novi Sad used by the local administration are:

• Serbian: Нови Сад, Novi Sad
• Hungarian: Újvidék
• Slovak: Nový Sad
• Rusyn: Нови Сад (transliterated: Novi Sad)

In both Croatian and Romanian, which are official in the provincial administration, the city is called "Novi Sad". Historically, it was also called Újvidék in Hungarian and "Neusatz" in German.

This new website is a a gorgeous new digital heritage platform using the Digital Public Library of America’s open source technology. The platform, Digital Heritage of Novi Sad (bbns.rs), provides access to digitized cultural and historical materials from approximately 200 institutions in or around Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia, all searchable by place, time, and subject. According to project leaders, they are in the final phase of equipping a modern digital laboratory with scanners and graphics processing workstations for digitizing new material into the platform. 

This is just one of many examples of the impact of the Digital Public Library of America on access to the world's records. By the way, the word for genealogy in Serbian is генеалогија. I would have to be able to read Serbian a little better than I can to see if there are any documents on the site, as yet, that will help directly with genealogical research. But every effort to open up cultural and historical websites should be encouraged.