A Working Vacation: The Archives of Switzerland

desk view in the Basel Staatsarchiv

In late March, J and I embarked on a 10 day 'working vacation' to visit archives and libraries in Switzerland to collect information for his dissertation research. Some of it was scouting to find out what is available (since many archives have incomplete or nonexistent online catalogs, and even if they do sometimes you can only read the title and year) and some of it was to gather data that hasn't been digitized yet (i.e., tables in a printed book, not an Excel file).

Archives and libraries are closed on the weekend (some also on Mondays) and almost all of them are only open from 8 or 9 to 5 (sometimes with an hour lunch break), so we had extra time for vacation activities. It turns out that archive work is pretty tiring, but we really enjoyed working in such beautiful places. Later I'll get to telling about the vacation part, but in this post I wanted to share about the archives. Before we went, it sounded very mysterious and important to me!

First, some background: Switzerland is divided up into cantons and the cantons are further divided up into bezirks, which are comprised of gemeinde (municipalities). The cantons are pretty autonomous (they get to set a lot of their own policies), so the type and breadth of information collected by the cantons differs quite a lot. The cantonal libraries and archives also differ a lot in terms of accessibility, technology, policies, etc.

A typical day at the archives looks like this:

lots and lots of files,
requested through either paper or computerized systems

lots of picture-taking (where allowed)

there are 12 GB of pictures just
like this one on my laptop!

J was the brains, I was the brawn -- he found the useful documents,
and I either took pictures or transcribed the tables into Excel files

At the end of the day, everything looks like this because we had looked at so much text!

Some of the buildings were really beautiful. St. Gallen, in particular, has a  lovely Staatsarchiv and Kantonsbibliothek.

the Staatsarchiv is located in converted cloisters, right next to the cathedral
that's J in the front, braving the snow

the Kantonsbibliothek is operated by the local uni. It's in a neat old building
with beautiful interiors, a great coffee machine, and exceptionally nice staff

perfect library stained glass inside the Kantonsbibliothek

While we waited for requests to come in, I browsed through old books including these beautifully written ledgers from the late-1500s and early 1700s.

In total, we visited:

• The Staatsarchiv and the National Library in Bern
• The Staatsarchiv in Lucerne
• The Staatsarchiv in Zurich
• The Kantonsbibliothek in Basel
• The Staatsarchiv and Kantonsbibliothek in St. Gallen

Going to all these archives and libraries was a neat way to see a lot of different cities in Switzerland, from the beautiful but ridiculously over-priced Bern to flashy Zurich to quaint and delightful Lucerne. We saw many, many beautiful sights and overall had a great trip -- more on the vacation parts of our trip to follow!