Data Resources

Data Interfaces

The ZB Data Map illustrates the data flows between the various systems of the ZB (Central Library Zurich). This documentation of interfaces helps you access our data for your research. The Data Map is still under development and is continuously being expanded.

Datasets

We offer collections of data on various topics for free download in open data formats. This selection is regularly updated. These datasets are also typically searchable via opendata.swiss.

- Photographs by Robert Breitinger
Robert Breitinger-Wyder was a heating engineer and stove manufacturer in Zurich. At the age of 45, he became a hobby photographer, as did many members of the bourgeois society of Zurich at the time. His works, created between 1886 and 1910, feature a factual style. He primarily photographed views and individual buildings in the city of Zurich, but also included views from other parts of Switzerland. Other themes include art and crafts, frozen lakes, trees and flowers, fountains and monuments, ships, stoves, and more.

- 3D data on the sphere of the St. Gallen Globe
The "St. Gallen Globe - online" is a joint project by the National Museum, St. Gallen Abbey Library, Zurich Central Library and ZHdK. The underlying photographs by Martin Stollenwerk were modelled in three dimensions by the ETH Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
Original (ZIP, 90 MB)  |   Replica (ZIP, 49 MB)

- Promptuarium Genealogicum by Carl Keller-Escher
This dataset includes image links, full texts, and metadata for the seven volumes of "Promptuarium Genealogicum" by Carl Keller-Escher (1851–1916). This approximately 2,800-page genealogical work contains information about members of 258 historical Zurich families, some dating back to the 16th century.

- Zürcher Nachtzedel
The digitized versions of the "Zürcher Nachtzedel" (1780–1818) were created between 2023 and 2024 at the Central Library of Zurich’s digitization center and will be published on the e-manuscripta platform. This dataset includes the data published so far (as of August 2024) on e-manuscripta, covering the years 1780 to 1784, which are representative of later issues of the "Nachtzedel".

- Maps with Title Cartouches from the “Prachtsatlanten” Collection
From the collection "Prachtsatlanten: From the Beginnings to the Golden Age" on the e-rara online platform, a selection of around 1,930 maps from richly illustrated old atlases of the Central Library of Zurich has been assembled. These maps all originate from the heyday of representative atlas production in the 17th century.

- Printed Travel Reports from the 16th to 19th Centuries
Printed travel reports from the 16th to 19th centuries shaped the perceptions of foreign lands and continents. They informed, distorted, and dramatized, satisfying readers' curiosity. They could evoke both admiration and wonder as well as feelings of superiority. The travel reports digitized on the e-rara platform are partially available as full texts and can be searched by keywords.

- Johannes Itten Linked Archive (JILA)
This dataset contains the open semantic data on which the linked open data application ‘Johannes Itten Linked Archive (JILA)’ is based. The knowledge platform is designed as a search gateway to the estate of the Bauhaus master and Swiss art theorist Johannes Itten (1888-1967) and is based on a personal network generated from over 5200 document pages.

DataTools

Would you like to work directly with our data? We are building a portfolio of tools to make it easier for you to work with our data collections.

- Jupyter Notebooks
The Central Library of Zurich provides Jupyter Notebooks for searching and analyzing nationwide library data from the SLSP catalog (>25 million entries). These allow you to download up to 10,000 search results in a table format (title, author, publisher, place of publication, publication date, etc.) for a chosen search term.

-Source Code Offerings
We provide various software applications on our Gitlab instance.