Central Library Solothurn

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Central Library Solothurn

The Solothurn Central Library is a public library in Solothurn ( Switzerland ). It fulfills the tasks of a city , regional and canton library . Its importance extends far beyond the region, especially because of its extensive old stock , which includes numerous manuscripts , incunabula and old prints .

History and predecessors

The Central Library (ZBS) was created in 1930 from the merger of the then Solothurn City Library with the Solothurn Cantonal Library.

library

The Solothurn City Library was founded in 1763 under the influence of the Enlightenment by Franz Jakob Hermann as an authoritative library and initially built up mainly from donations from Solothurn patrician families. In keeping with the spirit of the times, however, this library was still strongly museum-orientated, only open a few hours a week, and loans were only available to donor families. Until 1798 it was housed in a book room in the town hall, which had to be abandoned when the authorities of the Helvetic Republic needed the room. The books were put into storage and only returned to use in 1807, on the ground floor of the Franciscan monastery that was closed in 1798 .

However, the reactionary spirit of the censorship commission continued to make building up and using the property more and more difficult during the restoration of the patriciate. Free, general access to reading was considered dangerous. Among other things, the students of the higher educational institution with the exception of the upper classes were forbidden to visit the library. Censorship of all new acquisitions was later demanded, and in 1817 the library was finally placed under a permanent "spiritual inspector", whose instructions the librarian had to follow in his acquisition policy. Leo Altermatt writes in his essay on libraries in the Heimatbuch Der Kanton Solothurn (1949) of a "storm of indignation" that this development had evoked; the then librarian Robert Glutz "submitted ... the resignation and devoted himself entirely to historical research".

In 1838, after the liberal overthrow, the situation of the library changed fundamentally: Not only did it move to larger, more suitable premises in the new town hall of Solothurn, where it was to remain until the merger with the cantonal library, but above all it was carried out the library regulations of the new, liberal city administration from a citizen to a public and freely usable city library. "On this basis, the city library continued to develop, without ever losing the character of an educational library, until it was merged into the larger unit of the central library in 1930 for practical, organizational and financial reasons".

Cantonal library

The canton library was built in the last quarter of the 19th century to accommodate the book collections of the monasteries and monasteries that were closed after the Solothurn culture war in 1874 . Although the cantonal council had decided to set up a cantonal library as early as 1875, it could not be opened until 1883. The holdings were placed in the throne room of the former ambassador 's court, which at that time served as the cantonal school building.

The formerly independent libraries that served as the basis of the collection include:

  • Chapter library of the St. Ursenstift
  • Jesuit or professor library
  • Franciscan Library
  • Library of the Mariastein monastery (returned from the central library to the monastery restored in 1971 from 1998)

In the following decades, the library was enriched by donations and purchases with additional valuable holdings, including the large libraries of the Franciscan Franz Louis Studer and Bishop Friedrich Fiala .

Central Library

After the merger of the city and cantonal libraries in 1930, two building competitions for a building in the Schänzli area on the Rötibrücke were held in 1941 and 1942. However, the winning design by Hans Zaugg was fiercely attacked. A new situation arose when Emil R. Zetter ceded a property on Bielstrasse to the city in 1944, with the testamentary decree to set up a library there. In 1945 the Pfister brothers were commissioned with an extension, which began in 1956 and was completed in 1958. In 1958 the ZBS moved into its current premises in the west of the city. The building complex consists of a patrician house built at the end of the 17th century and a new building for the library. The music library set up in 1973 and various offices are housed in the patrician summer house ( Gibelin-Zetter-Haus ). From 1958 to 2012 it also housed a book museum. The new building houses the open access department, reading room and the children's and youth library.

The open access department and the public music library, together with the children's and youth library, fulfill the tasks of a public library for the city and region of Solothurn.

Events are held regularly in the reading room of the Solothurn Central Library. From 1992 to 2008, the Solothurn Pottery Society enjoyed Gastrecht, a lecture society that was founded in 1857, in the winter months .

The Central Library joined the Cooperative Storage Library Switzerland together with other partner libraries in 2014 .

Duration

The total inventory of the ZBS comprises around 800,000 media units. Her main task is to preserve the Solothurn cultural heritage, the Solodorensia - this includes publications with content-related reference to the city or canton of Solothurn, works by Solothurn authors, illustrators, artists and musicians, biographies of Solothurn personalities and publications from Solothurn publishers. Printed or electronically published Solodorensia on the topics of regional history, local history and culture are recorded in the bibliography of the Solothurn historical literature .

The children's and youth library provides up-to-date children's and youth literature in its open access holdings of around 30,000 media units. Older works can be found in the magazine.

As a cantonal and city library, but also as a research library, the Solothurn Central Library follows a collection policy, according to which important but no longer current works from the areas of history, German studies and musicology are stored in the open access departments.

In the main series Publications of the Solothurn Central Library founded by Leo Altermatt , the Music series introduced by Christine Holliger from the Solothurn Central Library collection and the Small Series founded by Verena Bider in 2011, works that deal with the collections and the Solothurn cultural heritage appear in loose succession deal in a wider sense.

Historical holdings

The historical holdings largely taken over from the predecessor libraries include an extensive collection of manuscripts with a collection of Latin, German and Hebrew fragments from manuscripts of various origins, a historical collection of prints of around 80,000 units, including almost 900 incunabula and 4,000 prints of the 16th century, as well as graphic, photo and map collections.

Estate collection

The central library collects personal papers from people who are culturally or scientifically active with reference to the canton of Solothurn, but also collections that have been created in the canton. These include the Charles Sealsfield Collection, the Hesse Collection Rosa Muggli-Isler, Kilchberg, or the scientific legacy of the Basel philosopher Hans Kunz .

Music collection

The historical music collection houses the artistic legacies of Solothurn composers, for example those of Theodor Diener , Richard Flury , Ernst Kunz and Elisabeth Spöndlin ; the collection includes valuable manuscripts for music, such as a manuscript by Arthur Honegger deposited with her , and a large number of rare old music prints.

The public music library has one of the largest publicly accessible records in Switzerland. It offers around 43,000 sound carriers , mainly CDs , records and tape cassettes , holds numerous subscriptions to music magazines and set up a streaming service in 2018. In May 2020, the expansion of non-Solothurn media was stopped.

Picture collection

Central librarian Leo Altermatt put together an extensive collection of images in the 1950s: the Solothurn iconography with graphics of the canton's villages and a collection of photo portraits of important Solothurn residents. Later non-Solothurn graphics were added, as well as photo collections on the history of the canton and the city of Solothurn as well as bequests from Solothurn photographers. In 1991 a postcard collection was acquired. It was digitized in 2007 and made available on the Central Library's website.

City archive of Solothurn

Since 1969, part of the old holdings of the city archive of the community of Solothurn had been deposited in the central library. These old holdings have been sorted and recorded by an archive indexing company since autumn 2011. They have been housed in the Solothurn City Archives since 2012. A directory is available on the Central Library website; the central library is entrusted with the task of mediation.

literature

  • Leo Altermatt: Librarianship. In: The Canton of Solothurn. A home book. Gassmann, Solothurn 1949, pp. 127-135.
  • Hans-Rudolf Binz: The historical music collection of the Solothurn Central Library. An overview. Central Library, Solothurn 2005. (Publications of the Central Library Solothurn, No. 27 A).
  • Annual report of the Solothurn Central Library for the year ... Solothurn, 1930 ff

Web links

Commons : Solothurn Central Library  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leo Altermatt: Libraries . In: The Canton of Solothurn. A home book . Gassmann, Solothurn 1949, p. 130 .
  2. ^ Leo Altermatt: Libraries . In: The Canton of Solothurn. A home book . Gassmann, Solothurn 1949, p. 132 .
  3. ^ Tighter building competition for a new building for the Solothurn Central Library . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 121 , no. 13 , 1942, pp. 152–155 ( e-periodica.ch ).
  4. ^ Hans Marti : The central library in Solothurn: Architects Gebr. Pfister, Zurich . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 78 , no. 19 , 1960, p. 317 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-64887 .
  5. ^ Storage library in Büron: Support association founded. Press portal of the Canton of Lucerne. Retrieved December 29, 2015.
  6. ↑ Once the music library department was highly innovative, it is now being closed. Solothurner Zeitung , April 30, 2020.
  7. ↑ Postcard collection now on the Internet: Central Library Solothurn: Solothurn history in snapshots: From Aedermannsdorf to Zullwil . In: Oltner Tagblatt / MLZ , October 20, 2007
  8. ↑ hist.net, platform for history and digital media , November 11, 2007

Coordinates: 47 ° 12 '35 "  N , 7 ° 31' 47"  E ; CH1903:  606901  /  228758