e-rara Digitised Rare Books and Prints from Swiss Institutions

Overview and History

e-rara (e-rara.ch) is the portal for digitized rare books and historical printed works from Swiss libraries. It was developed as part of the e-lib.ch (Swiss Electronic Library) project and went live in March 2010. The platform was initiated by Prof. Rudolf Mumenthaler, and is jointly operated by the Bibliothèque de Genève, the ETH Library, Basel University Library, Bern University Library, and the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. Additional libraries also contribute their holdings to the platform. A comprehensive technical redesign was completed in 2020. The project's initial focus was on 16th-century Swiss imprints — considered the golden age of Swiss book printing — including works by Vesalius, Paracelsus, and Zwingli.

Collections and Holdings

As of 2021, e-rara hosts more than 84,000 digitized titles covering printed works from the 15th to the 20th century. Material includes rare books, maps, illustrated works, ephemera, and themed subject collections. Holdings of particular interest include 16th-century bibles and Reformation-era texts, as well as private libraries of notable figures such as Huldrych Zwingli, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Gottfried Keller, and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Access and Usage

All digitized content on e-rara is freely accessible to the public without registration. High-resolution color images can be downloaded as PDFs. The platform provides multiple viewing modes including zoom, scrolling, and thumbnail views, along with a virtual table of contents as a navigation aid. IIIF support enables integration with external research tools.