The monograph Old Postcards of Celje is a project of the Celje Central Library on the occasion of its 70th anniversary on the Museum Square. The authors of the monograph are Alenka Hren Medved and Janja Jedlovčnik, who have prepared a selection of the most beautiful old postcards of Celje and the surrounding area, which are kept by the local history department of our library.

Since the establishment of the local history department of the Central Library of Celje in 1976, postcards have been a part of the special collections to which both the curators of special collections and the library management have devoted a lot of attention and funds for supplementing the collection. The most recognizable local history workers who built an extensive and diverse collection of postcards were Vlado Novak, Božena Orožen and Tatjana Kač. The postcard collection was initially classified according to the system of consecutive numbers "numerus currens", but over time it was discovered that the collection would be much more useful if a local and thematic arrangement was chosen for classifying the postcards. Today, the postcard collection comprises 9,293 units. In terms of acquisition method, most postcards were acquired through purchase and exchange, while a relatively large share of the collection is also represented by legacies. The most valuable part of the collection is represented by lithographs created during the golden age of postcards, which depict mainly larger towns in the Celje region (Celje, Laško, Žalec, Velenje, Mozirje ...), health resorts in the Celje area (Rogaška Slatina, Dobrna, Laško, Rimske Toplice ...) and important railway stations or railway junctions, such as Zidani Most. In addition to postcards from the Celje region and the wider Celje area, the collection also contains postcards from other Slovenian towns and European and world cities.

A major turning point in the recognition of our postcard collection was triggered by digitization at the beginning of this century. In the first phase, employees of the local history department began digitizing postcards from the Celje area and attaching low-resolution previews to the COBISS/OPAC online catalog. The idea of a joint online portal KAM – libraries, archives, museums, was also born, on which Celje cultural institutions would publish the postcards they hold. Unfortunately, the project was not entirely successful, as only the Central Library of Celje published a part of the postcards in KAM. Retrospective bibliographic processing of the postcards and detailed editing of the collection in recent years have only increased the transparency and accessibility of this interesting collection.

Digital collection Celje on old postcards.