Swiss National Library, Bern, Switzerland
The Swiss National Library is located in Bern, Switzerland. In 1895, it was founded with the goal of collecting and preserving all publications about Switzerland. It has 140,000 meters of shelf space containing everything in print from Switzerland, starting from the middle of the 1800s. Among items its collects are books, photographs, posters, maps, and magazines. These materials are in the four national languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Romansh. All Thais will know about German, French, and Italian, but some may not be aware of Romansh. It is a Romance language mostly heard in the southeastern Swiss canton of Grisons, where it is spoken along with German and Italian. With all these different languages, it is natural that there are many documents. By one recent count, the Swiss National Library owns over five million documents on paper. The library has an active digitization project. By the start of 2015, about 11 million pages had been digitized. This only represents half of one percent of the library’s total collection. Books published within the past 50 years may be borrowed from the library. Older books may be consulted onsite at the library. Researchers in the subjects of history, literature and the arts find the library’s collection of particular interest.
The library was originally based in a small four-room apartment in downtown Bern in 1895. In 1899, it transferred to the Swiss Federal Archives. It moved to its present location in 1931, in a building designed by the local architechts Alfred Eduard Oeschger, who was awarded the first prize in a competition for designing the library. Oeschger had it built it with two other architectural offices, those of Emil Hostettler (1887-1972) and Josef Kaufmann (1882-1962). At the time when he won the competition, Oeschger (1900-1953) was still in his twenties. Its design was in a style fashionable at the time, known as the New Objectivity. This approach to the visual arts tried not to be too romantic, with very clear lines and much natural lighting. There is more about New Objectivity available in a book in the Thammasat University Libraries collection. The book is located in the general stacks of the Boonchoo Treethong Library, Lampang Campus. The Swiss National Library design includes an eight story book depository tower. The building’s interior was renovated from 1994 to 2001, for modernization. Seven stories of underground storage were added below one of the library’s garden areas. This allowed part of the landmark tower to be available for public use, since it was no longer required for book storage. Computerized work stations were added for readers. Four additional stories of underground storage were added between 2005 and 2009.
Since 2005, the library’s director has been Marie-Christine Doffey, who earned a master’s degree in advanced studies in arts management at the University of Basel. In an article in Alexandria, a publication about national and major research libraries, Ms. Doffey wrote in 2009:
The last ten years have seen a huge growth in online material but little or no decrease in print; in the next years, storage capacity for all media will be required. New underground stacks, inaugurated in August 2009, provide the library with space until 2030 at the current rate of print production. A major challenge will be the increased requirements for electronic storage capacity and preservation; not just for Web archiving and borndigital material but also for the large amounts of digitized material that are being produced…The electronic book, long hailed as imminent, seems finally to have arrived. The proliferation of reading devices such as the Kindle may change both collection management and user expectations. Digitization on demand, currently a niche product for the library, will increase if e-readers make loading and access more user friendly…National libraries around the world are seeking increasingly to underline their relevance to all sections of the public, not just a research ‘élite’. The Swiss National Library has always been open to the general public and is unusual in that it lends out its more recent material for home use.
In addition to her professional competence, Ms. Doffey is admired for her abilities with languages. She is reported to speak Spanish, Italian, French, German, English and some modern Greek.
Among the highlights in the vast collection of the Swiss National Library is the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA). The SLA was created in 1989 after the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt donated his manuscripts to his nation. The TU Libraries have a few books by and about Dürrenmatt. There is also the Swiss National Sound Archives based in Lugano, Switzerland, with over 500,000 sound recordings. Some specialized collections show an interest in South Asia. The Desaï Collection consists of the personal library of Dhirajlal B. Desaï (1908-1951) the first Special Ambassador and plenipotentiary Minister of India in Switzerland. Paintings on fabric and Kangra miniatures were also donated by the Desaï family. Its approximately 1700 items relate to Indian philosophy, religion, history, ethnology and sociology.
The Indica Wyss Collection was formerly the property of Johann Rudolf Wyss (1909-1988), a Swiss philologist and librarian from Zurich, who wrote about India and also collected philosophical and religious literature, classical poetry in Sanskrit, and works dealing with art and sacred architecture.
Thailand and Switzerland
All Thais are familiar with the strong association between the Kingdom and Switzerland over many years. Since 2015, the Swiss ambassador to the Kingdom of Thailand has been His Excellency Ivo Sieber. He was born in Widnau, Switzerland, a small city of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. After studying law at the University of Zurich, Ambassador Sieber earned a master of laws degree from the University of Sydney, Australia. Ambassador Sieber has previously served in Bangkok in 1994 as counselor and deputy head of mission for the Swiss Embassy. Last year he told a Swiss interviewer that by the end of 2016, over 9000 Swiss were living in Thailand for all or part of the year, and increase a few hundred from the previous year. 150 Swiss companies based in the Kingdom have created around 50,000 jobs. Last year, over 200,000 Swiss tourists visited Thailand for an average of about two weeks, while most of the nearly 100,000 Thais who visited Switzerland in 2016 were tourists.
Helping with Civic Responsibility and Medical Education
Last September, the Embassy of Switzerland, located on North Wireless Road in Bangkok, participated in the Clean up Bangkok project. With other embassy staff and students from Mahidol University, they cleaned the streets around the Millennium Hilton Bangkok Hotel to raise awareness of the problem of plastic waste.
Last October, the Swiss Thai Innovation Medical Academy (STIMA) was established to provide a platform for medical exchanges between Thailand and Switzerland. Academic exchange, cooperation, education, innovation, skills and expertise are planned to be concentrated on by Chulalongkorn University, Cosmo Meditec, Ltd., a Thai company, and Epimedical, a Swiss company.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)