swisscovery search profiles allow you to search the holdings of more than 500 libraries in Switzerland, external resources (e.g. e-rara), and billions of electronic resources such as journal articles, e-books, dissertations, and conference proceedings. This chapter provides a brief overview of these resources.

E-Resources:

A wide range of open access and licensed digital collections is available, including databases, journals, newspapers, articles, and film and audio streaming services. Access to specific electronic resources may be restricted to members of certain institutions, depending on the provider’s license terms. To see accurate availability, sign in to swisscovery and use access systems such as VPN, Eduroam, or EZProxy.

Physical resources:

In swisscovery, you can find all materials held on site by participating libraries. In addition to printed media such as books, magazines, and newspapers, this includes other physical items such as images, films, sound recordings, manuscripts, early printed works, letters, archival collections, and maps.

Digital objects:

Valuable holdings from swisscovery libraries—especially special and historical collections—are extensively digitized, indexed, and made available for immediate online access. In addition to books, journals, and newspapers, these may include manuscripts, letters, early printed works, and archival materials from platforms such as e-rara, e-manuscripta, and e-codices.

Consortium resources:

The consortium of Swiss university libraries licenses scholarly resources such as electronic journals, e-books, and databases, which can also be searched in swisscovery. This includes national licenses, which provide full-text access not only to researchers, students, and university staff, but also to private users residing permanently in Switzerland.

Institutional repositories:

Many universities provide open access to research papers and theses through online repositories. These repositories are indexed in swisscovery and linked directly to the publication on the respective platform.

Full text articles and more (CDI):

swisscovery also searches the Central Discovery Index (CDI), a unified index for scholarly and academic content worldwide. It contains over 5 billion records from thousands of publishers, aggregators, and repositories.

Note: By default, swisscovery also searches inside the full text of CDI content. To exclude these results, you can disable the “Search in full-text (CDI)” option.