AIM: Bibliographic processing of the historical book collections of the National Medical Library of Czech Republic using modern technologies. METHODS: Records for historical book collections were created de visu. Rules used: AACR2, ISBD (A); format used: UNIMARC; subject indexing: MeSH, Konspekt, UDC. Every exemplar has its own bibliographic record (copy description). Every item (bounding items) has a separate record too; these records are linked through linking entries. To bibliographic records, scans of title pages, interesting book bindings, illustrations, exlibris etc in jpg format are added. Most records contain notes regarding the copy in hand, action notes and provenance notes. RESULTS: During two years the Rare Prints Collection and the Fritz Collection were processed (some 1300 bibliographic records). Records are available on www.nlk.cz in the Medvik system. In this database it is possible to search by: title, author, secondary author, printer, conservator, place of publication (in the present form), publisher name, date of publication, subject. The proposed procedure appears labor, time and finance intensive. DISCUSSION: Is our proposed processing method effective? Is it necessary to create so extensive bibliographic records, when the user base is not so large? If minimal bibliographic records were used, could historical book collections be processed quicker and cheaper? CONCLUSIONS: Processing historical book collections in National Medical Library of Czech Republic allows modern searching for old prints in a computer database. User evaluation is very high. Our library plans to continue this processing until all historical collections are attended to. These activities are good starting point for digitizing of historical collections which is goal of our library in the future.