The revenant: Creating access to legacy card catalogues

Abstract

The University of Houston Special Collections is home to the KUHT Collection, which includes significant audiovisual assets from the nation's first non-commercial educational television station. This paper describes a pilot project undertaken by Special Collections staff to convert one portion of the analogue card catalogue for these audiovisual holdings to machine-readable text and make the catalogue available online. The paper includes a summary of past card catalogue conversion efforts. It explores the rationale for many of the decisions made, as well as lessons learned through the pilot that will inform future efforts to make the analogue catalogue and the video assets more accessible to researchers and students.