National library collaboration digitises Swedish print

To digitise Swedish printed material from the 15th century to the present day is the goal of a collaboration between the National Library and the university libraries in Lund, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Uppsala and Umeå.

This is digitised in the project

The material that is digitised consists of books, newspapers, journals, reports and teaching materials published in Sweden. There is already a lot of digitised material, both at the various libraries and in platforms such as Litteraturbanken. With the collaboration, the libraries are taking a holistic approach to systematically digitise and make the entire Swedish print available.

When the libraries digitise, they produce research data, as the material acquires new areas of use and can be analysed with new methods. Therefore, digitisation takes place according to international standards and in collaboration with other digitisation operators. The material is scanned or photographed page by page and the text is OCR-interpreted; converted to searchable text.

Find and use the digitised material

The libraries digitise material that is in their own collections and the material can then be found in the national catalogue Libris. The entire document will be available in full text via various publishing platforms. An ambition for the collaboration is to also make it easier to use digitised material, for example via open linked data.

Facts about the collaboration project

The collaboration between the libraries began in 2020 with the signing of a letter of intent.

Download the letter of intent (In Swedish)

The collaborative project is led by a steering group:

Lars Burman, chairman, Chief Librarian Uppsala University Library
Håkan Carlsson, Chief Librarian at Lund University Library
Lars Ilshammar, Deputy National Librarian, The National Library
Morgan Palmqvist, Chief Librarian, Gothenburg University Library
Mikael Sjögren, Chief Librarian at Umeå University Library
Wilhelm Widmark, Chief Librarian Stockholm University Library

Co-opted to the steering group is Mats Malm, Litteraturbanken

Project manager is Karin Byström from Uppsala University Library.

Contacts

Lars Burman, Chairman of the steering group, Chief Librarian at Uppsala University Library
Email: lars.burman@ub.uu.se
Phone: 018 - 471 39 10

Karin Byström, Project manager, Uppsala University Library
Email: karin.bystrom@ub.uu.se
Phone: 018 - 471 33 69