Easier to find the library’s older materials
During May, a large proportion of Gothenburg University Library’s older materials will become searchable in the national library catalogue Libris and on the University Library’s website.
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 around 700,000 titles, of which around 300,000 are now being made available gradually this spring.
The card catalogue has already been scanned and digitised, but its contents have not been searchable via standard search services. The material will now be available via both the search service on the University Library’s website and Libris. Initially, however, users will be redirected to the scanned catalogue to order the material.
AI has made this work possible
Since autumn 2023, a project has been underway to improve the searchability and accessibility of the library’s older material. 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 manager for the initiative.