Background information

General information

The Austrian Library Network (OBV) is the largest network of scientific and administrative libraries in Austria with 70 participants, representing more than 90 individual institutions - including the Austrian National Library, the university libraries and the colleges of education; individual ministries, numerous technical colleges and other important collections (e.g. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Parliamentary Library, AK Wien, MAK and the Sigmund Freud Foundation). All participants share the same online cataloguing network.

Specifications

The Austrian Library Network started online operation in 1988. At the beginning of 1999, the new Integrated Library System Aleph 500 has been established on a national level. With this system - and later with Alephino (for smaller libraries) - all online catalogues of single library institutions were freely available on the World Wide Web; so was the Austrian Central Catalogue (ACC), which has been maintained by OBVSG as the network's headquarter. In April 2010 the new search engine of the Austrian Library Network was launched. It has succeeded Aleph's web OPAC as a more powerful discovery interface.

Initially, the catalogue mainly covered publications dating back to 1980. Most consortium members have been and still are adding older references by editing single titles or organising retro cataloguing projects. Additionally the catalogue is providing links to full texts of electronic media and electronic documents like abstracts or tables of contents.

In 2015, the cloud-based library system Alma was awarded the contract to succeed Aleph 500. In 2017 the first libraries switched to Alma. Alma is since then the primary library system in the Austrian Library Network. In late 2021 all members of the library consortium switched to Alma – until then both systems were operated in parallel.

Key data

The Austrian Central Catalogue includes 19 million titles with 31 million copies and 0.7 million journals (status: April 2023).

Visit the Austrian Central Catalogue at https://search.obvsg.at