About E-Periodica
What is E-Periodica?
E-Periodica is the platform for Swiss journals online and is a service of the ETH Library. Subjects range from the natural sciences through architecture, mathematics, history, geography, art and culture to the environment and social policies. At E-Periodica you'll find freely accessible journals from the 18th century through to the present. Resources are being continually expanded and supplemented by current editions.
At E-Periodica you can browse through millions of pages, perform full text searches and download information as PDF, JPG or full text files. Pictures are provided by a central IIIF image server (IIIF: International Image Interoperability Framework). The IIIF viewer OpenSeadragon integrated in the platform enables you to visually experience journals in a new way. Zoom into the pages as you please, swipe through the issues and keep an overview with the integrated table of contents.
The convenient full text search can be combined with searching by author and title, and will help you in queries. The journals on E-Periodica are structured and indexed with metadata, so that search results contain further bibliographical information in addition to the full text hit list. Thanks to integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the full text hit list is not only displayed as a result set, but also highlighted directly on the digital issue page.
More recent editions on E-Periodica can have a maximum embargo period of five years, if so specified by the publisher.
The Swiss National Library is a co-operating partner of E-Periodica and also provides digitised journals from its collection on E-Periodica.
How it all began
E-Periodica began as a project called E-Archiving of the ETH Library (2005–2008). The project was dedicated to the long-term digital availability of scholarly content. A subsidiary project of E-Archiving involved the retro-digitisation of printed journals and setting up a suitable presentation platform.
The innovation and co-operation project «e-lib.ch: Swiss electronic library» followed E-Archiving by initiating the retro.seals.ch project (2008–2013). Supporting e-lib.ch were the Swiss University Conference, the ETH Board and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.
Implementation of the retro.seals.ch project was begun jointly by the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries in co-operation with the ETH Library (2008–2012). In 2013, the project was fully transferred to the ETH Library.
In 2015, the back end was completely overhauled and further developed. The platform received a new design and a new name: E-Periodica. In 2016, E-Periodica took part in the Best of Swiss Web competition, and received awards in the Usability, Technology and Mobile categories.
A further step occurred in 2020: The IT infrastructure and the front end were wholly overhauled, and the layout adapted to the corporate design of ETH Zurich. All images on E-Periodica are now supplied by a central IIIF image server.
The focus of E-Periodica originally lay on academic journals. The platform's profile has since successively expanded, however. Today, the range also includes non-academic subjects.