Adding digital representations to library catalogue records for rare books

The LCCOS Retrospective Cataloguing team has been making digital images of copy-specific features from rare books available in the library catalogue.

UCL Special Collections holds many printed items containing copy-specific features that make them unique, such as inscriptions, bookplates and annotations. These handwritten and visual elements are often challenging to describe verbally in catalogue records.

Since March 2023, the Retrospective Cataloguing team has been capturing digital images of these elements and linking them to the relevant bibliographic records in the catalogue using our digital collections system, Alma. These low-resolution images are taken with mobile phone cameras using a scan tent.

The images can be viewed on Explore via a link in each relevant bibliographic record, and also on the UCL Digital Collections website, giving library users the opportunity to see these unique features online for the first time. And where cataloguers have struggled to decipher handwritten inscriptions, the images provide an opportunity for researchers to offer their interpretations enabling cataloguers to enhance the descriptions.

You can see some examples of digital images taken so far in the General Rare Book Collection: partially digitised section of the UCL Digital Collections website. Usage statistics show that users have already started viewing these.