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About

Libraries

THE DSI COMMUNITY LIBRARIES

The DSI Community Libraries aims to provide a platform for research and development of librarianship, digital literacy, and data science.

The goal of the DSI Community Libraries is to bring together various interest groups, researchers, and infrastructure providers interested in the topic of digital libraries and related research areas. A network of participating researchers and service providers shall be established to discuss the main topics of future research in the field of information science and their importance to research libraries. Furthermore, project results will be used to sharpen the role of academic libraries in digitally transformed universities.

Why?

Why?

The challenge of the digital library questions the role of libraries as centers of infrastructure and services, thus redefining the academic library.
What?

What?

What impact does the development of digital science have on libraries and what can the libraries/the digital sciences contribute?
How?

How?

Focussing on data science, digital literacy, we support the development of librarianship, research services, the collaboration of academic libraries and science.

Community facts

3

Projects

24

Members

THE DIGITAL SOCIETY INITIATIVE (DSI)

What questions about digitalization are on your mind? And how has your life changed with the digital transformation? Digitalization is presenting society and science with new challenges. It is taking hold of a large part of our lives at an ever faster pace.

The Digital Society Initiative (DSI) shapes the digital transformation of society and science. With interdisciplinary activities in research, education and outreach, the DSI is the University of Zurich’s (UZH) competence center on digital transformation.

The DSI is a scientific institution supported by all faculties of the UZH, which promotes independent scientific reflection and innovation on questions of digital transformation. It prepares UZH students to help shape the digital transformation, engages in regular discourse with the public and supports policy-making on digital transformation issues.

DSI Community Libraries

Our goal is to understand the way in which libraries as hosts of information can make this information more accessible.

How can libraries promote the digital skills of students and young researchers and how can digital literacy be improved? In what way can libraries support researchers on data-driven topics and projects? How can libraries support the long-term integrity of relevant research data, including functionality, persistent access, and archiving? What are the effects of the principles of open science on research and infrastructure? What digital skills do librarians need? What are the differences between disciplines in handling data and digital objects and how can libraries manage them? How can libraries manage their collections, digitize content and provide platform-interfaces adhering to FAIR principles?


Scigate is a project under the lead of Prof. Dr. iur. Walter Boente and is concerned with supplying a unified search entry point to the vastness of legal data. Its first prototype can be found here.

ORD-Xplore aims to support the Open Research Data (ORD) standards and FAIR principles for repositories of digital editions to better accessibility and usability. It is led by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bernard and his team.

Know more about our work.

To understand the role of the library in a digital world, we support numerous projects.

Get in touch

Questions, inputs or just want to get to know us? Contact us here.

Membership in the DSI Community Libraries is open to researchers affiliated with a Swiss university. For other individuals, membership is conditional on an ongoing cooperation with the DSI Community. To become a member of a DSI Community, membership in the DSI Network is required. Please follow this link.