Digitizations

Since 2002, the UB has been digitizing selected prints from its own holdings and making them available online without access barriers. Most of the digitized items are Bernensia. This is part of the UB's mission as a cantonal library and prevents publications from being digitized twice worldwide. The digital data is accessible on DigiBern or on the national platforms E-Rara and E-Periodica. Since 2016, the Rossica Europeana collection of the Swiss Eastern European Library has also been digitized. From 2020, manuscripts from the Rossica collection will be made available digitally on e-manuscripta.

The UB is continuously expanding this digital offering. Since 2017, around three million newspaper pages from the cities of Bern, Biel and Thun as well as from the Bernese Jura have been digitized and made accessible as full text on the e-newspaperarchives.ch platform in a multi-year project together with the Verein Zeitungsdigitalisierung im Kanton Bern (Newspaper Digitization Association in the Canton of Bern) and newspaper publishers.

The Thun newspapers have been on e-newpaperarchives since 2019 and the Bernese daily newspaper Der Bund since 2020.