Converting the card catalogue of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus, into a machine-readable format

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Date

2008

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing

Abstract

In 2006 the National Library of South Africa (NLSA), Cape Town Campus, began a project to convert its substantial card catalogue to machine-readable form. The article gives an overview of the Library's collections and catalogue and describes the project methodology. Funding was secured from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and an in-house team appointed to begin the conversion. In order to meet project deadlines, the work of the in-house team was later supplemented by outsourcing the entry of records into the online catalogue. With the successful completion of the project, NLSA has been able to offer Internet access to many rare publications, whose whereabouts have previously been little known, and a significant contribution has been made to the bibliographic control of South African imprints.

Description

Keywords

National libraries, Cataloguing

Citation

Coetzee, H. & Skelly, L. (2008). Converting the card catalogue of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus, into a machine-readable format. Alexandria, 20(3): 121-131