In May, a large volume of older material from the Gothenburg University Library’s card catalogue will become searchable in the national library catalogue Libris and on the University Library’s website. This is part of an ongoing project in which nearly 300,000 records are being made available.
Much of the Gothenburg University Library’s older material, published up to and including 1957, is collected in the card catalogue “Katalog -1957”. The catalogue contains just over 700,000 cards, of which nearly 300,000 are now gradually being made available gradually during the spring.
The card catalogue has previously been scanned and digitised, but its contents have not been searchable via standard search services. The material will now be available both via Libris and the search service on the University Library’s website. Initially, users will be directed to the scanned catalogue to order the material.
The project, which aims to improve the searchability and accessibility of the library’s older materials, has been underway since autumn 2023. Using AI tools and a proprietary method, metadata from catalogue cards has been extracted and interpreted, and then matched against Libris. In the next phase, Libris will be enriched with new bibliographic records for titles that are currently missing entirely.
– We are very pleased to be able to make large parts of our older collections visible in this way in a short space of time. This is a task that would have been incredibly time-consuming to carry out manually, but which has now been made possible by developments in IT and the close collaboration across different areas of expertise within the project. For our users, both within and outside the University of Gothenburg, this means significantly improved access to the library’s older materials, says Markus Nolgren, project leader for the initiative.