How did the idea for the KVK come about - and what problem did you want to solve back then?

We wanted to greatly simplify the search for literature. To do this, the KVK was to be a meta-catalog with a search mask that would send many requests to different target catalogs at once.

What was the biggest challenge - technically or organizationally?

The main problem at the beginning was that the application required an extremely large amount of computing capacity and the BIB only had a few, very expensive servers from IBM. In tests, I managed to speed up the application by a factor of 100! Without this optimization, the KVK would hardly have survived the first few years.

How do you see the role of the KVK in today's digital research landscape?

The KVK is a good addition to the many large overall indexes that have been created in recent years. These do not cover such a wide range of target catalogs. It is still very important for people looking for rare literature.

How did the idea for the KVK come about - and what problem were you trying to solve at the time?

At the time, I was an IT specialist and deputy head of the IT department. At that time, I was intensively involved with the emerging Internet search engines such as AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos and WebCrawler. In 1995 and 1996, the first meta search engines were added, such as MetaCrawler in the USA and MetaGer in Germany. Their principle was to pass on users' search queries to existing search engines and merge the results. This meant that users no longer had to start the same search multiple times in different systems, but instead only had to use a single interface. It was therefore logical to transfer this principle to library catalogs. Initially this concerned the local Karlsruhe library catalogs (University Library, Institute Catalogs of the University, Badische Landesbibliothek), but soon we were also able to include various library networks. This made it possible for users at the university to search all the important libraries in the region simultaneously with just one search query.

What was the biggest challenge - technical or organizational?

When the KVK became known, the traffic - i.e. the number of search queries - increased massively. This put a heavy strain on the servers in the university library at the time, but the DFG then provided funding for new hardware. Another problem was that the library associations saw the KVK as unwelcome competition at times; they themselves had been working unsuccessfully for some time on a project for an all-German library catalog (which still does not exist in this form today). However, as the KVK quickly became extremely popular, they could not afford to simply shut it out.

How do you see the role of the KVK in today's digital research landscape?

The KVK is still the only way to search all relevant library catalogs in Germany and many other countries in one go. It is also used by many institutions, for example by VG Wort to calculate royalties for authors of books. There have of course been many projects to merge library search systems over the last 30 years, but (surprisingly) none have yet managed to replace the KVK.

What hurdles did the early KVK face?

One of the biggest challenges was the technical context of the time. In the mid-1990s, the web was still in its infancy and there was basically only CGI (Common Gateway Interface) as a common standard for dynamic websites.

At the same time, very different library catalogs had to be connected, often without standardized interfaces. In most cases, HTML had to be parsed and interpreted differently depending on the catalog. Automating search queries and merging the results required some creative solutions.

Another important aspect was expandability - it should be easy to connect new catalogs to the system.

How do you see the future of the KVK?

I'm pleased to see how the application has continued to expand and what has come out of the small beginnings to date. I hope that the KVK will continue to support many people with their research tasks for the next 30 years!