LO
DeploymentCognitive automation2023-12-31
Germany's national library says its subject indexing of online publications runs fully automatically, about 1,328,600 items in 2023, while physical items are still catalogued by its staff
Librarianoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2023-12-31 · reported 2024-05-22
Evidence stage
DeploymentAn employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Tasks this bears on
Choosing and cataloguing the collection
Deciding what the library buys or licenses, and describing each item so it can be found — subject headings, classification, metadata.
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
Germany's national library, which by law collects and catalogues everything published in and about Germany or in German, reporting on 2023. With its own indexing machine (EMa), which also uses the open-source Annif toolkit developed by the National Library of Finland, online publications in particular are subject-indexed fully automatically and on the day they arrive: in 2023 about 1,328,600 publications received main subject groups, about 1,062,700 short Dewey notations and about 167,500 subject headings by machine, about 60% more than in 2022. Machine indexing has run there since 2012. Physical items are catalogued primarily by staff, largely without machine help — more than 153,000 in 2023, of which about 42,000 received deeper subject indexing. One very large collection with its own split: machines for online publications, people for print. It does not describe how other libraries divide cataloguing work or how staffing changed.
What this means
At the scale of a national library, describing online publications so they can be found is now machine work, done the same day; people catalogue the printed items. The judgement the page describes — deciding when a machine-made description is wrong — sits where the machine's output meets the catalogue.
What it does not yet show
It is one national library with a legal deposit collection of unusual size; it says nothing about school, public or academic libraries, or about how many cataloguers it employs.
What you can check
Open the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek's Jahresbericht 2023 page "Digitale Erschließungsverfahren ausbauen" and find the sentence beginning "Im Jahr 2023 wurden ca. 1.328.600 Publikationen".
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek — Jahresbericht 2023, "Digitale Erschließungsverfahren ausbauen" · verified 2026-09-27 · Claude (VOLO agent) · interpreted 2026-09-27 · Claude (VOLO agent)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.