Universitätsbibliothek Basel
Tobias Viegener
Project coordination swissbib
+41 61 267 13 07
tobias.viegener@unibas.ch

"Swissbib" is a publicly accessible complete catalogue of the academic libraries of Switzerland. It enables users to search quickly and conveniently through 17.4 million datasets from 880 institutions.

• Daily updated data from all university networks in Switzerland, the Swiss National Library and the document collections ZORA and "retro.seals.ch". Other data sources are being prepared.
• Searching is made easy thanks to the use of the latest search engine technologies and web2 technologies for convenient filtering, faceting, customisation and highlighting of search results in full-text versions
• Intuitive search in four languages (DE,EN,FR,IT).
• Functionality can be easily extended by incorporating external services, such as the Recommender Service BibTip.
• Open to flexible further development by incorporating direct user feedback.
• Offers up-to-date methods of connecting to other systems by SRU or OAI-PMH and search engine linking.
• "Swissbib" search boxes or widgets can be included in other systems.
• Local views available for groups of libraries or partial holdings (e.g. local view Zurich).
• Direct and efficient linking to Worldcat.

"Swissbib" is Swiss university libraries' answer to the growing popularity of commercial search engines in academic research. Instead of aiming for high volume and popularity, "swissbib" offers easy and customised, high quality searching of a wealth of scientific publications. One particular challenge facing researchers is how to use the very diverse thematic search terms used by the various participating library catalogues. The strengths of "swissbib" are the speed of its searching, how well it can be adapted to meet local needs and the openness of its interfaces for receiving and sending data.