Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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1.5.2
The Swiss National Library (NL) was established by an act of the Swiss parliament on 28 June 1894, with the mandate to collect all publications relating to Switzerland and its people — collectively referred to as "Helvetica." The library opened to the public in 1899 in the Federal Archives building. In 1931, it moved to a newly constructed building at Hallwylstrasse in Bern, designed in the Modernist style of New Objectivity, which is now a listed historic monument. A second underground stack, dedicated to newspapers and periodicals, opened in 2009. Between 1994 and 2001, the building underwent significant renovation.
The NL's collections encompass books, newspapers and periodicals, websites, maps and atlases, university and corporate publications, official publications, printed music, and electronic publications. As of 2020, the library held 4.8 million publications. The Prints and Drawings Department holds prints from the 17th to 20th centuries, photographs, postcards, and posters. The library also houses the Swiss Literary Archives (established 1991) and has incorporated the Swiss National Sound Archives as an organisational unit since 2016. Special collections include musical estates, the Archives of the New Helvetic Society, and the Claude Kuhn Archive of over 350 posters.
The Swiss National Library has an extensive collection of Swiss newspapers and periodicals. In 2011, the library launched Swiss Press Online, an archive of digitized Swiss newspapers; this was upgraded in 2018 to the e-newspaperarchives.ch service. The library also hosts the ISSN Centre Switzerland, which assigns ISSNs to Swiss serial publications, and maintains the Swiss Press Bibliography covering political newspapers and periodicals back to 1803. The e-Helvetica collection encompasses digital-born publications including e-journals.
The library is open Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 18:00. Holdings are catalogued in the Helveticat online catalogue, which contains some 1.5 million entries. There is no legal deposit law, but the library has agreements with Swiss publishers for voluntary deposit. Digital collections are accessible through the e-Helvetica platform and the e-newspaperarchives.ch portal.
Swiss National Library
Hallwylstrasse 15
3003 Bern, Switzerland
Phone: +41 58 462 89 35
Email: info@nb.admin.ch
Website: Swiss National Library