Abstract
The General Catalogue of Printed Books has been the principal means of access to the reference collections of the Department of Printed Books of the British Library for over a century. While current material is catalogued using computer-based systems, entries for pre-1971 imprints have been printed and pasted into the working copy of the guard book catalogue. This article describes the project to convert the pre-1971 catalogue entries contained in the General Catalogue into machine-readable form using an optical character recognition system. It sets out the results achieved and outlines the stages that will be followed as the project passes from its development stage to live operations.
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