Digitisation of card catalogues
Since 2023, a project has been underway to improve the searchability and accessibility of the library’s older materials via the national library catalogue, Libris, and the library’s own search service.
About the digitisation of card catalogues
The aim of the project is to make the library’s largest catalogue of older materials, containing references to over 700,000 works from earliest times up to 1957, available via Libris and Supersearch.
AI tools and a proprietary method are used to extract and interpret metadata from scanned catalogue cards, which is then matched against catalogue records in Libris. Material that was previously only available in scanned card catalogues is thus made searchable in the national catalogue, significantly improving access to the library’s older material.
This work involves close co-creation between various areas of expertise within Gothenburg University Library and collaboration with other Swedish university libraries that are carrying out similar digitisation projects. This work would have been extremely time-consuming to carry out manually, but has been made possible by recent IT developments.