Swiss metacatalogue launches

A beta version of Switzerland's next-generation meta-catalogue, SwissBib, has been launched, giving the Swiss public the opportunity to research 14 million title records from 740 libraries.

'After two years of project runtime and an intense year in 2009 of productive cooperation with OCLC, we are proud to present to the Swiss public SwissBib, our cross-library, easy-to-use search engine. The existing service provides a sound basis for reaching our goals in the field of multilingual subject indexing, and due to the modular architecture it is easily adaptable to future requirements,' commented Hannes Hug, head of the SwissBib project.

SwissBib is implemented in partnership with the library network of Western Switzerland (RERO), the Library Network of German-speaking Switzerland (IDS), the Swiss National Library, the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries and the ETH-Bibliothek with the backing of the University Library of Basel. SwissBib is one of a number of projects within an over-arching program of innovation and cooperation by Swiss universities, known as E-lib-ch. It is funded by the Swiss University Conference.