Our projects

New offerings and services open up access to our holdings and help the ZB to become an even better place to learn and obtain information – both virtually and in person.

The digitised copies of our manuscripts and printed works are no longer sufficient for researchers and scientists. They also need the image content, i.e. the text, in digital form. That is why we want to set up a new Digital Text Production research service and develop a process that can be used to extract digital text from digital images using automated methods. We will add markup to this text according to TEI standards and make it freely available online.

Process development is being carried out in two sub-projects based on pilot holdings: ‘Digital edition of the correspondence of Hans Georg and Hermann Nägeli’ and ‘Jeanne Hersch: digital reprint of writings’. The processed digital images from both sub-projects will be made available at sources-online.org.

Sub-project 1: Digital edition of the correspondence of Hans Georg and Hermann Nägeli

To the sub-project 1 website

Sub-project 2: Jeanne Hersch: digital reprint of writings

 To the sub-projekt 2 website

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

The aim of this project is to bundle and coordinate previous activities of the ZB in the field of digital publishing and to focus on the development of research services. This is primarily a question of taking the experiences we have gained in the two Digital Text Production sub-projects (see above) and conceptualising them as research services. They should be able to be used by researchers as services for further digital publishing projects. In this way, the ZB meets the wishes and needs of the research community and contributes to the development of research infrastructures. As a research partner, the ZB is supporting science in general and digital publishing in particular in an effective and innovative way.

Specifically, the aim is to expand the ZB’s range of services from image scanning with OCR to layout recognition, segmentation, NER/NEL, standard data linking and text markup according to TEI standards. The aim of metadata creation is to collect publication-specific metadata and create and edit standard data. However, consideration should also be given to other services in the area of digital editions.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

Since the early 19th century, the Wille family of Zurich had maintained contacts with important figures in politics, business, the military, and culture throughout Europe. In 2021, the family handed over its significant private archive to the Zurich Central Library on condition that it be catalogued in its archive information system and made searchable in ZBcollections by the 100th anniversary of the death of Ulrich Wille, Switzerland's commander-in-chief during World War I. Since February 1, 2025, the documents in the Wille family archive have been available to researchers and the interested public in the Special Collections reading room without any restrictions.

In order to protect the fragile originals and to further facilitate their use, the ZB is digitizing a selection of frequently used and particularly significant documents and publishing them online on the national platform for digitized manuscripts from Swiss libraries and archives, e-manuscripta.ch.

The project is financially supported by the Oscar Fritschi Stiftung, the “Donation Prof. Dr. Maria Bindschedler” and Baugarten Zürich.

Data is fuel: In the digitization project with “Google Books”, large amounts of data are generated from the digitized material linked in Swisscovery. We aim to exploit the potential of these full texts and images together with their metadata and make them usable by offering them as open cultural data through new services and shared platforms for research and teaching.

This data project is designed as a cooperative venture under the title “SwissGB4Research”. Together with our partners at Basel University Library, Bern University Library and Lucerne University Library, we were able to complete the preliminary project at the end of 2024 and develop a realistic scenario for making the data available. The goals for the main project in 2025 are to set up basic operations. We will publish the full texts and digital copies - 350,000 volumes or 100 million pages - with a focus on visualization/dashboards, corpus creation and interfaces. It is important for us to involve researchers in order to align our services with actual needs. The infrastructure and funding will be built up over the course of the year so that the next steps can be strategically secured at an interim stop at the end of 2025. The expansion of the infrastructure with regard to generic research needs, particularly in connection with interfaces and corpus creation, is planned for 2026.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

As a combined terrestrial and celestial globe, the famous St. Gallen globe from 1576 provides insights into the history of globalisation and the cosmology of its time. In the initial phase of this cooperation project, we developed the basic model of an online globe so people could explore the globe at any time and from anywhere in the world. Based on this, we are planning a range of activities in cooperation with academic institutions and the public in the context of the project.

Project partners: Swiss National Museum, Abbey Library of Saint Gall, Zurich University of the Arts, ETH Zurich Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, University of Zurich Center for Historical Mediology

In order to make the globe even more accessible, a smaller model was built. This model is on display in the reading room of the ZB. It allows visitors to experience the full functionality and iconographic imagery of the globe and its frame. It thus complements the online version and the original globe exhibited at the Landesmuseum.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

We are cleaning up our catalog: The digital data from the ZB that you find in Swisscovery today was created at different times in different library systems according to different sets of rules. A considerable portion of the data dates back to when the decades-old card catalog was digitized in the “Medea” project. This data, some of which is incomplete or incorrect, is being comprehensively cleaned in the “Theseus” project (2025 to 2027 initially, expected to continue until 2030): specialists in old prints are completely revising title data so that it can be used as research data. Once processed, titles and copies from the modern collection can be searched and ordered without restriction. We are making these improvements on an ongoing basis so that your searches will become increasingly efficient and reliable.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

The Zurich cultural heritage from our collections is invaluable to both researchers and the general public. We are running a wide range of digitisation projects, often on a cooperative basis, to create high-quality digital versions of our holdings and compile the associated metadata to make them available online and usable for research.

Numerous digitisation and research projects from recent years have now been completed. We are currently developing new research services in the field of digital text production and digital editions.

On the ‘Digitisation and Research’ page, you can learn more about our services in this area.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

As a follow-up project to the retrodigitisation of the NZZ, the ZB will digitise four additional Zurich newspapers by the end of the year in cooperation with their respective publishers and the Swiss National Library. The periodicals will then be published free of charge on the newspaper platform e-newspaperarchives.ch. This means that in addition to the NZZ, we will be making even more important Zurich newspapers available online with searchable wording. The following years will be digitised:

• Tages-Anzeiger          1893−1959
• Der Landbote            1836−1950
• Zürcher Oberländer  1853−1970
• Anzeiger von Uster    1846−1954

A total of around one million newspaper pages are being processed by external service providers.

The digitisation of Zurich newspapers is supported by the Lottery Fund of the Canton of Zurich.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

Change and new challenges require cooperation, new ways of working and new competencies. Our projects are therefore a place for us to develop as employees, as an organisation, and as a partner for collaborations.

The University Library Development Project (AUB) is an initiative of the University of Zurich, carried out in close cooperation with the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. As the key partner of University Library Zurich, the Zentralbibliothek is involved in various work packages within the project. Our common goal is to create a powerful and effective partnership for research, teaching, and study at the University of Zurich (UZH). This partnership is characterized by efficiency and innovation and offers our customers outstanding services from a single source.

In the first phase of the project (2017-2021), the foundations were laid for the establishment of the University Library Zurich, which began operations on January 1, 2022. The second phase (2022–2023) served to consolidate the cooperation between the University Library and the Zentralbibliothek. A significant result of this phase was the joint strategy of the University Library and the Zentralbibliothek for 2024–2027, which marks a new high point in our cooperation.

In the ongoing third phase (2024–2027), a particular focus is put on the joint implementation of this strategy. Other priorities in this phase include the development of a joint website, the expansion of cooperation to include special collections and holdings, and the development of a joint archiving concept for printed holdings.

You can find the website for the main project here.

If you have questions or would like to share your views, contact:

Modern technology, logistics and buildings are the basis for a modern, efficient service offering from the ZB.

Our old building was partially renovated in 1983 and a number of individual measures have been carried out since then. But improvements are needed, for example to remedy problems with the indoor climate affecting the cultural heritage and replace outdated electricity and IT infrastructure.

We are therefore developing a sustainable building strategy for the old building to serve as the basis for a comprehensive renovation. We aim to put in place an infrastructure that provides the best possible working environment for both users and ZB staff, and creates optimum storage conditions for protecting our historical holdings. Building work is scheduled to begin at the end of 2021, and the renovation is intended to satisfy requirements for the next 25–30 years.

If you have questions about the project, contact:

If you have any questions reagrding our completed projects, please contact: Verena Klein

Citizen Science

As a place of public culture and education, we made it one of our strategic goals from 2021 to 2024 to support and carry out citizen science projects. This field of activity was established as part of a project and has been an integral part of our services since 2025. On this page, you can find out which citizen science projects you can participate in to make your knowledge available to the public and contribute to research.

Development of systematic customer research and customer experience

To make sure our services and products offer our customers added value and a positive and intuitive experience, we developed structures and processes for systematic customer research and CX management in our library.

Connecting Itten. Sub-Project 2: Linked-Open-Data Knowledge Platform

The ZB holds the literary estate of the Swiss artist, art theoretician and teacher, Johannes Itten (1888-1967), which has been fully catalogued and is available via ZBcollections.

In a second project phase, the Johannes Itten Linked Archive (JILA) was developed, which is based on linked semantic data (Linked Open Data) from the Itten Archive. You can find more information about the project and our project partners here.

Developing ZB-Lab

The ZB Lab is an experimental space for making creative use of our diverse data. We actively use the Lab for research concerns, for Citizen Science projects and for our own developments to improve the usability of our data.

You can find the website for the main project here. 

ZB-SharePoint: launching a collaboration platform

In this project, we launched a collaboration platform with Microsoft Office 365. Our aim was to link some 240 members of staff together and make it easier for them to work together both within and across departments. But there was more to the project than technology: we reorganised our knowledge and information flow, and created a central location to work together flexibly and virtually.

Repository for e-Turicensia

As a cantonal library we collect Turicensia: publications on topics related to Zurich, by Zurich authors, or that are printed in Zurich. As throughout the publishing world, they are increasingly appearing in digital format. During this project, we developed the repository «Zurich Open Platform (ZOP)» to preserve the digital publications from our collection long-term, present them and make them accessible to the public.

CAS in Data Management and Information Technologies

A grounding in IT and experience in handling data are becoming indispensable to many library functions. We therefore created a new CAS course in Data Management and Information Technologies. Further information about the CAS course can be found here.

ALPZUG: a step on the way to SLSP

What is the connection between libraries and Alps? In December 2020, Switzerland brought all its universities closer together with a joint Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP) and a centrally organised library management system (Alma). ALPZUG (a German acronym standing for “Alma Primo Zentralbibliothek Universität Gemeinsam”) was the joint project of the Zentralbibliothek and the libraries of the University of Zurich to pave the way for the new framework. You can find information about the Swiss Library Service Platform here.

ZiBits: digital self-study courses for lifelong learners

Our new e-learning offering is designed to assist lifelong learners in their search for research literature. For those in this category, having to write a dissertation at the end of their course is a particular challenge: many have family and work commitments that leave them little free time; some have little experience of writing texts of this kind; most have no access to university e-media from home.

To that end, we developed the online tutorial Recherche.fit (in German only). 

National Infrastructure for Editions – Infrastructure nationale pour les éditions (NIE-INE)

This cooperative project created the work and publication platform inseri, that is open to all academic publishing projects in Switzerland. The resulting Semantic Web technologies are available here. As one of the institutions taking part, the Zentralbibliothek supported those involved by providing legal advice on matters of copyright, data protection, contract and company law.