Digitised publications are the result of transforming an analog original (such as a book, a poster or a journal) to a digital file. The book, poster or journal will continue to exist in its paper form and will be preserved by the Swiss National Library (NL) for future generations. A digital copy is made available online and therefore becomes accessible to people around the world. The aim of digitising the SNL’s collections is to offer a new way to access documents and new research opportunities. By granting remote access to its collections, the NL is seeking to offer a better service to its users.
Only the Helevetica documents that meet the following criteria can be digitised and made available for online consultation:
They are no longer under copyright or an agreement with the rights' holder has been made: documents published before 1900 may therefore added to the digital collection ; for those published later, conditions must be negotiated;;
They must meet an NL user demand, particularly in the library's areas of specialisation, which are: Swiss history, Swiss art, Swiss literature and information and documentation sciences.
In 2009 the NL has adopted a digitisation strategy which defines selection principles, priorities and objectives for digitisation until 2015.
Access to the digitised collections of the NL
The NL would like to make its digitised collections as widely accessible as possible. It is, however, required to comply with copyright law, which protects work for 70 years after the author's death. That is why certain collections can only be consulted in the library reading rooms, while others are freely accessible on the Internet.
The NL digitises part of its collections in collaboration with institutional or private partners. Access to these publications may therefore be outsourced to the partners. This is particularly the case for the newspapers accessible at different addresses and the journals put online by the library of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich as part of the e-periodica.ch project.
Books can be consulted using the e-Helvetica interface.