How should national libraries balance their physical and digital collections? We assess all three pillars of sustainability together — environmental, economic, and social — across Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
National libraries safeguard a nation's published heritage — and increasingly hold it twice: on shelves and on servers. Growing digital collections require ever more infrastructure, energy and cost, while physical items must be preserved indefinitely for legal, scholarly and cultural reasons. ReVerDi asks what an optimal mix of physical and digital looks like, and measures it across three dimensions at once.
Energy, CO₂, water and resource use across the full life cycle of physical and digital media.
Investment and operating costs — and the public value libraries create for society.
Access, inclusion, working conditions and the safeguarding of cultural heritage.
Researchers from the partner universities and national libraries, bridging economics, data science, environmental assessment, architecture, law and conservation.
Enrico Bertacchini (University of Turin) co-authors the open cultural heritage strand, bringing deep expertise in cultural economics and Wikimedia / GLAM research.
The project runs across several strands. Each will grow into its own page — for now, start with the publications.
Peer-reviewed papers on the environmental, economic and social sustainability of libraries and digitisation.
What national libraries open on Wikimedia Commons, where it travels, and what generative AI does to its value.
Three strategic scenarios for the national library of the future — and their sustainability trade-offs.
Each output is tagged with the sustainability pillars it addresses — ● environmental, ● economic, ● social.
Recent milestones from the project.
Our work will be presented at the European Academy of Management Annual Conference (16–19 June 2026, University of Agder, Norway) — theme “Navigating High Waters”.
About the conference →
As synthetic images become free, does the world still want the real, authenticated one? Our newest strand tracks demand for genuine heritage images before and after the rise of generative AI.
Explore the strand →Our open-access study in Cleaner and Responsible Consumption combines life-cycle assessment with economic evidence — and shows that e-books reduce emissions only if they genuinely replace print.
Read the paper →The full international team gathered at Bern University of Applied Sciences to align the environmental, economic and social work strands and plan the next phase.
Read the blog post →New results on evidence-based digital preservation and on the economic value of open cultural heritage were shared with the international research community in Rotterdam and beyond.
A public outreach event planned together with the Swiss National Library and the Federal Office of Culture, bringing the project's findings to a wider audience.
