Digitisation of special holdings

Digitisation of audio material

22,000 analogue sound recordings containing more than 30,000 hours of recording have to be saved from disintegration. Most of those endangered items consist of tape recordings and music cassettes, recordings of live concerts, dialogues and addresses by writers, as well as results of field work done by investigators of folk music. On top of that there are a small number of cylinders, shellacs, and vinyl records. Many of those very valuable sound recordings are the only surviving ones of the events registered and are regarded as important examples of Austria’s cultural heritage.
Since 2007 the Austrian National Library has been carrying out a 10-year program to digitise the most endangered audio documents, in cooperation with the Austrian Media Centre (Mediathek) and the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Other holdings

In addition, the Austrian National Library digitises holdings from its own special departments, such as incunabula, papyri, placards, flyers, Hebraica, first editions of Austrian authors, books on the women’s movement, and others.

Catalogue enrichment - IVSCAN

The aim of this project is to make articles (author, title, language, number of pages) available from essay collections, festschriften, conference reports, and exhibition catalogues (periodicals and yearbooks excepted).