OA to Swiss technical journal backfiles

ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) is digitizing and providing OA to the backfiles of the technical journals of the Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein (SIA, Swiss Engineers and Architects Society).  For details on the project, see the ETH's pre-launch announcement in English:

The ETH-Bibliothek, the publisher Verlag der akademischen technischen Vereine and the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries have developed the following cooperation project: 131 volumes of the SIA technical periodicals Tec21 and Tracés will be digitized and named BaugedaechtnisSCHWEIZonline and Mémoire du bâti EN Suisse, respectively. The full text of the journals will be available on the Internet, free of charge in a user friendly format. The goal of the project is to make both the full text searching possible as well as the browsing through individual issues and volumes. Thus improve the accessibility and the dissemination of the journals, which document the unique Swiss building tradition.

The project encompasses an estimated 350'000 pages of text and illustrations, including the advertisements.…

Through the cooperation with the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries it was possible to win a competent partner for the supply of the digitized journals. The entire online collection will be available on their new journal platform SEALS Swiss Electronic Academic Library Service.

The new service was presented for the first time in January 2007 to the broad public at the trade fair Swissbau in Basel. The project is estimated to be completed by the end of May, 2007.

On June 15, ETH announced that the project had launched.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Read the announcement in German or Google's English.