Memobase opens the door to Switzerland's audiovisual memory

Switzerland’s audiovisual heritage is becoming much more accessible. On Memobase.ch, the national portal of the Memoriav resource center, users can now search through 1.5 million radio and television programs from the SRF and RTR archives. More than 650,000 of these recordings can be listened to or watched directly online.

From the «Tagesschau» to the climate debate

The archives date back to the 1930s. They include, among other things, historical news broadcasts, sports coverage, and cultural programs, thereby documenting Switzerland’s social, political, and cultural development over several generations. The collection is aimed in particular at researchers, media professionals, and the interested public.

In the long term, the RTS and RSI archive collections are also to be integrated into Memobase.

Putting it to the test: «FC Zurich»

The author’s first search—unsurprisingly—was for «FC Zürich.» Just like in the old days on Google, the search term had to be neatly enclosed in quotation marks. In other respects, too, the search experience feels a bit outdated—and thus almost fits with the glory days of FC Zurich that it brings to light. One of the results takes us back to July 1999: a preview report on «Tagesschau» about the upcoming soccer championship.

Today, the sequence seems like a snapshot from a different world of soccer. At the time, South African forward Shaun Bartlett was still wearing the FCZ jersey. With a budget of eight million Swiss francs, the city club was indeed well behind the league’s financial powerhouse at the time, Grasshopper Club Zurich, but still clearly ahead of FC Basel and the Young Boys—the clubs that would later shape Swiss soccer for many years to come.

FCZ hoped to catch up with the top teams in Swiss soccer with a significant budget increase. According to the article, this was made possible primarily by revenue from European competition. At that time, average attendance at Letzigrund was around 6,000 people.

Seven years later, FCZ actually achieved the goal it had set: On May 13, 2006, after 25 years without a title, the club won the Swiss championship again. The corresponding «Tagesschau» segment from 1999 is embedded in this article.

A Gateway to Fond Memories

Findings like these highlight one of Memobase’s particular strengths. The portal not only provides access to historical facts, but also reveals developments whose outcome was still completely uncertain at the time they were recorded. In retrospect, what began as a matter-of-fact preseason preview turned out to be the start of a story that, seven years later, culminated in one of the most emotional championship titles in Swiss soccer history.

Soon more than two million documents

Memobase brings together audiovisual content and metadata from approximately 160 Swiss institutions. In addition to radio and television broadcasts, this includes photos, films, and audio recordings. The multilingual search function, which spans different media and institutions, makes it possible to establish connections between sources from different collections.

With the integration of the SRG collections, the portal will in the future include more than two million audiovisual documents from Swiss institutions.

The expansion is the result of close collaboration between SRG and Memoriav. Both organizations aim to make Switzerland’s audiovisual cultural heritage more widely accessible through the platform, which underwent a major overhaul in 2021. In doing so, SRG is also fulfilling its legal mandate to make its archival collections available to the public.

A Virtual Look at the New Collections

On August 20, 2026, Memoriav will present the expanded search capabilities as part of a virtual InteraktivCafe. Daniel Hess, Memobase Manager at Memoriav, will present selected documents from the newly integrated SRG collections—ranging from historical editions of the «Tagesschau» to sources on the Schwarzenbach Initiative and the climate debate.

In addition, search and research strategies are presented that enable the collections to be used for journalistic, academic, and curatorial purposes.

The German-language InteraktivCafe will take place on Thursday, August 20, 2026, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. via Zoom. Registration is open until August 18 via [email protected] possible.