Digital policy

The Bibliothèque has developed in partnership with the research libraries of the City of Geneva a program to Digitize the intellectual heritage of Geneva that focuses on important groups of works drawn from the library’s collections.

Some 825,000 items from the print, manuscript and picture collections are involved, the equivalent, in other words, of 10.3 million pages, which breaks down as follows:

- Books (monographs): 4.8 million
- Newspapers, magazines, reviews (periodicals): 3.2 million
- Manuscripts and archives: 1.1 million
- Pictures: 800,000
- Sheet music: 200,000

This project is scheduled to take 10 years. Financing, which is in the process of being consolidated, will cover the costs of external digitization, the hosting of the digitized collections, and the expansion of the Digitization lab's own capacities.

The digitized collections will be accessible on terminals open to all patrons for free and with liberal user conditions, as is the case with our resources that are already on line.

The “research libraries” comprise the following Genevan institutions:

• Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie (and the Bibliothèque du Musée Ariana)
• Bibliothèque du Muséum d’histoire naturelle (and the Bibliothèque du Musée d’histoire des sciences)
• Bibliothèque du Musée d’ethnographie
• Bibliothèque des Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques
• Bibliothèque des Archives de la Ville de Genève

National and international context

Like the other activities of the library system, digitization exists within a context of cooperation and complementarity between institutions that are pursuing similar goals. This is the case of the Swiss national library and Switzerland’s cantonal libraries, which are tasked with collecting, conserving, and promoting the written and visual heritage of the country.

Coordination of their digitization efforts makes it possible to highlight coherent groups of works, such as rare Swiss books from the 15th to the 19th century collected in the e-rara.ch digital library, or the medieval manuscripts in the  e-codices.ch. Other types of documents also enjoy an approach in common, posters in the Catalogue collectif suisse des affiches, for example, digitized reviews and newspapers with Presse suisse en ligne.

Private public partnerships (PPP) prove quite useful for digitizing collections of newspapers that extend over long periods of time and include content that is still under copyright. The digitization of the Journal de Genève (1826-1998) brought together the Bibliothèque de Genève, the Swiss national library, and the current publisher of Le Temps around a project in common that was successfully concluded in 2008.

The Rero Doc digital library is a community platform that covers a broad spectrum of digital documents produced by the members of the Réseau des bibliothèques de Suisse occidentale which includes the Bibliothèque de Genève.

Collaborative work on the international level especially makes sense when the collections involve a particular theme or more universal figures, the Enlightenment, for example (notably the works of Rousseau and Voltaire), or rare sales catalogues of objets d’art.

Rules and conditions for the use of documents in electronic form