Zentralbibliothek Zurich

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The Zentralbibliothek Zürich data in HPB

The Zentralbibliothek Zürich was founded in 1914 as a city, cantonal and university library moving into its new building three years later. However, its foundations go back much further. These include the medieval library of the canon at the Grossmünster, which was re-established after the Reformation as a professors' library for the Hohe Schule. In 1629, a hundred years later, four former students and their Greek professor founded the city library, which was open to all citizens. And in 1835, the cantonal library was founded with the task of building up a scientific collection for the university.

The Alte Drucke und Rara collection manages the oldest holdings of printed books at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, a total of around 300,000 titles published before 1850, as well as rarities from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Zentralbibliothek Zürich has provided the HPB with 104,732 MARC records from Swisscovery, the joint catalogue of the Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP). They cover a period from the beginnings of book printing to 1830, but do not represent the entire collection. They are only partially catalogued on the basis of the cataloguing rules of the former Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz or, since 2016, on the basis of RDA. The majority of the records were created through catalogue conversion by recataloging titles without autopsies based on the alphabetical card catalogue.