e-rara is the portal for digitised printed works from Swiss libraries. These works range from books and maps to illustrated materials – from the earliest days of book printing to the 20th century.

e-rara pursues the following objectives:

• Coordinated digitisation of printed works from the 15th to the 20th century from Swiss libraries in accordance with uniform quality standards
• Central import into the portal of digital documents and bibliographical metadata
• Persistent DOI referencing of electronic documents
• Presentation of full texts, maps and illustrated materials on a common portal

Swiss printed works are digitised to some extent in collaboration with the digitisation activities of German libraries. e-rara makes its metadata available to international portals like Gallica, Heritage of the Printed Book (CERL) and the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) run by Harvard University.

The portal was developed as part of the e-lib.ch: Elektronische Bibliothek Schweiz project and went online in 2010. It is run by Bibliothèque de Genève, ETH-Bibliothek, Universitätsbibliothek Basel, Universitätsbibliothek Bern and Zentralbibliothek Zürich. Many other libraries are contributing to the expansion of the portal with their stocks.

As a national service, e-rara is addressed to:

• Scientists
• The general public
• Institutions that have their stocks digitised and wish to make them accessible in digital form to a broader audience via e-rara. All commemorative institutions whose stocks fit the e-rara profile may participate in e-rara.

Added value for scientists and the general public

• Hand-picked selection of Swiss printed works from the 15th to the 20th century from various Swiss libraries
• A constantly growing, freely accessible portal of high-quality, high-resolution digital colour documents
• Centralised access from the search page, ability to carry out a search in all content available on e-rara
• Simple navigation inside digital documents using a clear structure and access by chapter
• Long-term availability of digital documents as a result of permanent links
• OAI-PMH interface for downloading and subsequent utilisation of standardised metadata including links to the digital documents

Added value for partner institutions

• Increased national and international visibility of the institution and what it has to offer
  • individual subpage on e-rara
  • integration of data into research portals like Gallica via standard interfaces (OAI-PMH)
  • visitor numbers have grown continuously since the portal went online
  • broad geographical range of visitors
• Digitisation, backup, operation: services provided by e-rara
  • execution of the entire digitisation workflow from assessment of the condition of the stock to its going online
  • safe and expert handling of analogue stock
  • professional technical management of the portal and its content
  • direct import of metadata from library catalogues via standard interfaces (Z39.50)
  • long-term backup of digital documents (PDF, JPEG) including persistent links
  • transfer to partner institutions of masterfiles in TIFF format with bibliographical metadata and of structural data in METS-XML format

Subscribing to the service

• Establish contact via contact@e-rara.ch for the purposes of initial clarification

Costs

• Initial costs, particularly technical configuration: CHF 500 to 6,000 (depending on services provided and type of template)
• Digitisation, input, data import: on request (depending on material and the library to be digitised)
• Operation per year: about CHF 1.50 per 300-page book