Short Portraits of the Premium Sponsors
Swiss National Library: Sources from Switzerland for the world
The Swiss National Library is one of Switzerland’s foremost memory institutions. We collect text documents, sound recordings, images and online resources related to our country, catalogue them and hand them on to future generations. Our more than ten million documents are an essential part of the Swiss and worldwide cultural heritage. We enrich and preserve them in close collaboration with similar institutions both in Switzerland and abroad. While ensuring that our collections remain safe, we strive to make them accessible as widely as possible, thereby enabling everybody to use them. In addition to the classical library collections we hold important special collections in our Prints and Drawings Department, the Swiss Literary Archives, the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel and the Swiss Sound Archives in Lugano.
Come and join us on-site in Bern, be it for research, for an exhibition or an event. Or find us online at www.nb.admin.ch.
The Swiss Federal Archives (SFA)
The Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) are the Swiss Confederation’s service and competence centre for sustainable information management. They advise the federal government on the documentation of its business and safeguard data, documents, photographs, films, sound storage media and other documents. In this way, they enable the activities of the federal government to be understood over the long term. The Swiss Federal Archives hold the documents of the Federal State’s political bodies and the federal administration since 1798. The majority of the archive records are analogue, but the proportion of digital documents is increasing rapidly. Research in the Federal Archives can be carried out online: www.bar.admin.ch.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
What is the universe made of? How did it start? Physicists at CERN are seeking answers, using some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators.
At CERN physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 21 member states. You can find more information about CERN via at the following address: http://home.cern/about.