TUC library 1933. TUC card examples.


and taking notes before providing us with the outcome of their searches. Of course with 80 drawers and 130,000 cards this could be an arduous task and possibly a forbidding one for researchers unused to such archaic fi nding aids. Of these 130,000 cards, an estimated half are printed and the other handwrit- ten; whilst many have been annotated with notes.


The project The initiative to digitise the card catalogue started several years ago when I discovered a cache of 22 reels of microfi lm labelled “card catalogue” at the bottom of the microfi lm cabinet. This occurred as a consequence of the Library receiving a digital microfi lm reader. During training I learnt that it was possible to set the device up to scan reels of microfi lm into PDF fi les. From a previous project I was aware that it was possible to run Adobe Professional to OCR the PDF fi les and make them searchable.


And so I made several attempts to set the device up to record sample reels overnight, but there were always prob- lems in getting the device to consistently identify the cards as “frames”. This was frustrating. Although I could digitise the microfi lm the results were inconsistent, and after many a morning of reviewing a night’s failed scanning, and advice from our own IT Department, I decided this was not the solution and something more complicated was required.


I had previously successfully worked with a fi rm called Max Communications


January-February 2023


back in 2007 on an archive digitisation project when I was librarian at Anti-Slav- ery International. They had digitised our collection of abolitionist pamphlets www. recoveredhistories.org. So I contacted them to see if they might be able to help. Having got an estimate from them of the cost of digitising the reels of fi lm I managed to raise a small grant. Max Communications then took the reels and digitised them and passed them through optical character recognition software.


They then provided us with high resolu- tion images (for preservation purposes) and screen resolution PDF fi les. I then split these large PDF fi les into smaller fi les that approx- imately matched the physical drawers. Having spoken previously to the Univer- sity’s IT department I loaded these fi les up into the University’s cloud storage and made them available to users in virtual drawers as protected searchable PDFs. This allowed users across the world access to all the catalogues of the TUC Library for the fi rst time. However, what was available was basic and slow working, requiring time and some commitment to searching.


I was then lucky enough to get an off er of some money from a publisher who wanted to digitise one of our archive collections. (Gale Cengage are publishing our Marjorie Nicholson Archive, to contribute to their resource entitled Decolonization: the Pol- itics of Independence in Former Colonial Territories)


I approached Max Communications again and they agreed that they could create a searchable website. This was a new venture for them and they spent approximately six months developing a combination of software to produce a website. (They have used DRYAD, AtOM, Ajax and Wordpress software).


What they have produced is, I think,


remarkable. Although a prototype off ered much more Wordpress-type functionality (including a news section), we reduced functionality to a simple search engine with some help pages. But what a search engine! The site allows the user to key in their search terms and the website will search through all 130,000 OCRd cards, and then presents all the relevant results as a list.


As referred to before, a good proportion of the cards were handwritten and as such the OCR is imperfect, and my understand- ing is that Max Communications had to spend some time correcting the software to improve the character recognition. But the software does allow us to edit and correct misread text. There is also an option to Filter by Category, but as the option we chose was very much an economy version this will have to be done in-house and over time. Users can click on individual cards from the results to see more information and to then request to see the publications. This allows us the opportunity to engage with the users hopefully whilst the research is hot.


Signifi cance


Making the digital drawers available in 2020 was a break-through in allowing users access to all the catalogues online for the fi rst time. Launching the new digital card catalogue website in 2022 has made the availability of information easier and the process of searching so much simpler and quicker. It allows users comprehensive coverage of all publications and to a certain extent allows “data mining”, as users can discover roughly what proportions of the library cover certain topics or themes.


The original catalogue is in itself a fascinat- ing artefact recording the interests and con- cerns of the TUC. It remains a back-up and a learning tool; a steady, physical presence as much as the rest of the collections. IP


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 45


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