Digitisation of Swedish Printed Material
Digitisation of Swedish Printed Material is a collaborative project aimed at digitising Swedish printed material from the 15th century to the present day. The collaborative group consists of the National Library of Sweden and the university libraries in Lund, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Uppsala and Umeå.
About Swedish printed material
The participating libraries wish to lay the foundations for long-term work on Swedish digitisation, with the aim of ensuring that Swedish printed material is digitised and made accessible to support democratic society and to benefit research and education.
The libraries are taking a holistic approach to systematically digitise and make accessible the entire body of Swedish printed material from the 15th century to the present day. Through digitisation, the project is establishing an infrastructure for digital material. The starting point is a memorandum of understanding signed in 2020.
The University of Gothenburg Library is digitising material from our own collections and making it searchable via the national catalogue Libris.
SwePrint
In 2025, the collaboration partners were awarded funding from the Swedish Research Council to establish SwePrint; a national platform for providing access to digitised Swedish books and printed material. The initiative will be carried out over five years, from 2026 to 2030, and represents an important step forward for research in the humanities and social sciences that requires access to large volumes of text.
The Gothenburg University Library’s role is to contribute to the long-term nature of the project by planning and prioritising which material is to be digitised. During the project period, the extensive collection of older plays held in the library's collections at the University of Gothenburg will also be catalogued and digitised.