The National Library of Greece (NLG) announces the successful migration of the online catalog of the “Philippos Iliou” Bibliographic Lab from the old technological infrastructure hosted at the Benaki Museum to the NLG’s modern bibliographic documentation environment.

The Lab, which serves as a fundamental pillar for the study of the social history of the printed word and the compilation of a retrospective National Bibliography from the dawn of Greek printing through the 19th century, now integrates its wealth of records into the international machine-readable cataloging standard MARC 21, unifying this valuable material with the National Library’s central catalog.

Since 2017, the Lab has been operating thanks to the efforts of the National Library of Greece, of which it is the main research unit, as officially stated in the National Library of Greece’s Strategic Plan.

The completion of the integration into the National Library’s online catalog marks the beginning of a new era for the lab, ensuring full semantic interoperability, open access, and modern search capabilities for the scientific and research community. The transition to international bibliographic standards not only guarantees the long-term digital preservation and future interoperability of (Linked Data), but also enhances the functionality of the union catalog, highlighting the identification of copies, bibliographic sources, and the extensive subscriber database.

In this way, the legacy of Philippos Iliou and his collaborators—and especially that of Popi Polemi—gains a sustainable, modern digital ecosystem worthy of its national role. The National Library will not only preserve and maintain the vast body of work produced by this lab, but will also continue it with scholarly rigor and technical excellence.