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.