The media revolution from analogue to digital taking place in the past decades has confronted libraries with completely new challenges. The Austrian National Library seeks to make use of the new opportunities offered by the digital media in the best possible way.
In the early 1990s, the first joint electronic library system was introduced. 1995 saw the beginning of the transformation of card catalogues into online databases. The retroconversion of the entire analogue catalogues of holdings was completed in 2011, and by 2015 all of the catalogues had been integrated into the QuickSearch search engine.
As early as 1995, the Austrian National Library also had its own website, which offers an ever increasing number of online services.
Since the Amendment to the Media Law was passed in 2000, electronic offline publications have been subject to legal deposit provisions, which since 2009 have also applied to online media; web archiving has become one of the Austrian National Library’s new tasks.
ANNO (AustriaN Newspapers Online), the Austrian National Library’s first mass digitisation project, went online in 2003. This virtual newspaper reading room will continue to grow by roughly one million pages per year.