LibWorld – Switzerland II

This week our LibWorld journey stops once again in Switzerland. After Heidi Stieger introduced the German-speaking biblioblogosphere of Switzerland to us, Jean-Phillippe Accart continues with the frenchspeaking blogosphere. He is Head of Information and Public Services at the Swiss National Library, has always been very concerned by exchanging and sharing information with other library professional since 20 years. His own website has been created in 2003, and a new version relaunched in 2007. The same year, Archimag, a French professional magazine, has designated JP Accart as one of the five people that have mostly influenced the French-speaking library world. Among other books, the last one, “Le Métier de documentaliste”, is considered as a reference book in librarianship.

LibWorld Switzerland II

French-speaking Blogosphere in Switzerland

Switzerland is certainly one of the most advanced European countries in terms of connection and use of the Internet. Library resources are shared by 6000 libraries all around the country and most of them offer free access to the internet and databases. But, Swiss library professionals in the French-speaking part of the country (20.4% of a population of 7 590 000 inhabitants) are not very active on the Web, and a few of them have their own blog or website.

Among them, you can find five blogs:

  • http://www.idsuisse.org/: the very nice slogan of this blog by a young professional, Information, Documentation, Freedom, gives you an idea about what this blog is: an open window to the WWW.
  • http://campus.hesge.ch/id_bilingue/blog/: (in French and German) is a blog created by the main library and information school in Geneva. Created in 2007, it is a tool for students to write short articles about our profession.
  • http://www.souslapoussiere.org/index.php/: Under the Dust is a blog proposed by a record manager which gives another approach of the information world.
  • http://alliance.yoda.ch/: Beobachtungen in der Blogosphäre is in German, and the author is Roman Hanhar from the beautiful city of St Gallen.
  • http://www.pablog.ch/: is a blog on the relationship between libraries and the Web which is quite a program! And, in fact, this blog is very complete and full of information.

Apart from blogs, some professionals have their own websites. The first ones are in German: the one by Annekathi Weilenmann, http://www.biblink.ch/ is a true directory of links on the profession. And the other by Pius Muehlebach: http://www.muehlebach.ch/ is dedicated to Interlibraryloan. These two are really very good sources of information.

Following are two French-speaking websites: http://www.pierregavin.ch/ by Pierre Gavin who is specialized on cataloguing matters. On his website you will find courses and articles. The second website is mine http://.www.jpaccart.ch: dedicated to information and library professionals, it gathers the work of 20 years within libraries or documentation centers: 200 articles, 100 books reviews, 40 papers, 25 lectures, all online.

At the end, I have to mention three other Swiss websites related to our profession. These websites are from information brokers: