Too Early for April Fool’s – Is it Real or The Onion?

When I first saw this on Lorcan Dempsey’s blog I grinned. I thought it had to be something from The Onion, a little seasonal humour break.
“The digitisation project involved scanning 300,000 cards covering pre-1978 material held in the Arts and Social Sciences Library and all other branch libraries (except the Medical Library).
As well as providing a browse facility that gives users access to images of the original cards onscreen, Card Catalogue Online is able to perform full-text searches of the item descriptions recorded on the cards.”

It’s quite nostalgic, really, if you have students who grew up with actual cards. They appear to have stopped physical cards in 1978, thirty years ago.
Here’s the press release from Sept. 24, 2008:
Card Catalogue Online launched
I tried a search on the word “major”. The first hit was for a card for “manor”. Must be an OCR issue or a fuzzy search is being used since ‘taste’ returns tastes, caste, waste, Aste, Teste, tante, BASTE, fante, tasse, gaste, tarte, etc. in the highlighted terms.
I guess this was much less expensive all in with staff costs etc. than actually purchasing 300,000 OCLC or LC records and having MARC records that can link seamlessly to book covers, the main catalogue, and fulltext etc. like the main catalogue can.
I’d love to know more about the project’s beginnings. Is this what libraries might have done if all the techology available to us today had appeared fully formed and we’d not evolved with it? Would we have scanned and OCR’d our physical catalogues? Is this a good option for anyone left with a big ReCon project?
Stephen