Project description

• During the course of this major project, the tables of contens of all books in the stacks at the Frankfurt am Main site from the period between 1945 and 2012 (acquisition year) were to be digitised directly on the shelves

• made searchable using OCR text recognition,
• linked with the relevant data records, and
• • made freely accessible through the catalogue and the metadata services.

When the project began in 2019, the German National Library had already digitised more than three million contents lists of newly acquired books, as well as from the existing stock in Leipzig, and had made these globally available for free use, along with the bibliographic metadata. Gaps in the collection covering the years between 1945 and 2012 were largely closed as part of this major project. However, it was not possible to process all stock segments by the end of the project. Around 5.3 million books in the stacks of the Frankfurt on Main site had to be checked for tables of contents as part of the project. Of the 2.7 million tables of contents whose digitisation had been included in the original tender, around 2.1 million tables of contents with a total of around six million pages were digitised up to the end of the project. Following long delays, the import of the digitised content to the new provision platform (Yuuvis) could at last begin in early March 2024 and was completed in February 2025.

The project was successfully concluded in February 2024.

The aims of the project included increasing the visibility of the media collection, making it more accessible and improving the ongoing development of automated subject cataloguing processes in the long term by digitising tables of contents.

The process of importing the digitised tables of contents was initiated at the beginning of March 2024, thus enabling them to be used free of charge through the catalogue. The import process will probably be concluded during the fourth quarter of 2024.

Project framework

Duration

February 2019 to April 2020
August 2021 to February 2024

Contact

Kristina Knull-Schlomann