EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

The Swiss Digital School Library has taken a big step forward and has now become visible for its users.

As from 1st November 2011 the web portal of the Digital School Library educa.Biblio is accsessible online as a new resource hosted by the main Swiss education portal www.educa.ch.

The Digital School Library is available as “Digitale Schulbibliothek (dsb)” in a German and as “bibliothêque scolaire numérique (bsn)” in a French language version with German and French content sections respectively. Additional content sections in Italian and Romansh are envisaged for the near future.

educa.Biblio is the home page for all search functions of the Digital School Library, which allow for easy retrieval of learning resources with the help of key words. Search results can be filterered according to various criteria: for the time being filters can be applied to retrieve resources for a particular school-level, subject, or resource type.

In addition educa.Biblio provides general information on the design and development of the Digital School Library Project.

The important milestones in the development of the Digital School Library were the following:

• The conception of a semantic data model with the help of expert librarians and documentalists, which in turn allowed for the establishment of the meta data structure for the learning resources to be listed in the Digital School Library (see http://biblio.educa.ch/de/dokumentation-1 - will be updated soon);
• the development of a new tool called “Archibald2” for the purpose of cataloguing resources, which lead to a significant improvement of the usability in general and of the workflow for the gathering of learning resources in particular;
• the re-engineering of the central database of the Digital School Library, in which the descriptions of the learning resources are gathered and administered.

At present the Digital School Library contains about 70 resources in German and 30 in French. After completion of the basic technical jobs in the development of the library its holdings will now be augmented in the most expeditious manner possible.

For the time being educa.ch is happy to announce the going live of the Swiss Digital School Library. We hope that you can share our enthusiasm in this project and we would like to encourage you to address any queries or comments to Angela Rittener (angela.rittener@educa.ch), who is in charge of the Digital School Library project, and who will gladly provide you with a login for the Archibald2 tool in case you wish to try out yourself the process of cataloguing resources for the library.