About us

The Cantonal and University Library’s (BCU/KUB) academic collections on languages, literatures and music offer you a comprehensive selection of books, periodicals, electronic resources and other materials designed for teaching and research in these specialist areas. Our librarians also provide a full range of services. Please visit our information desks on the second and fourth floors of the BCU/KUB for advice on all matters relating to library services, information literacy, research data and open access.

In figures

Year opened: 2026

Open-access collection: approximately 70,000 items in the field of languages and literature, 16,000 documents in musicology and 11,600 music CDs

Staff: 13 staff members

Study spaces: 700 individual study spaces and 100 places in group study rooms

Information desks: 2nd floor – Languages and Literature, 4th floor – Music and Musicology. Open Monday to Thursday from 9.00 am to 12.00 pm and 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm, and on Friday from 9.00 am to 12.00 pm and 1.00 pm to 4.00 pm

Language Studies

Our language and linguistics collections are located on the first floor of the BCU/KUB. In addition to a collection of textbooks and dictionaries on national and foreign languages, we offer a range of works on linguistics focusing primarily on

multilingualism
applied linguistics
language teaching
dialectology
sociolinguistics
pragmatics and psycholinguistics

Literature

Our literature collections are located on the second floor of the BCU/KUB. They comprise primary and secondary literature in the original language, mainly for the following languages:

German
English
Spanish
French
Italian
Romansh

Slavic Studies and Central and Eastern European Studies

The Slavic Studies collection is dedicated to Slavic languages and literatures and is located on the first and second floors of the BCU/KUB.

The Slavic literature collection contains primary works, secondary literature and reference works in the following languages: Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech and BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian). The Russian and Polish literature collections are extensively represented and also include works on Russian and Polish philosophy, history and the history of ideas.

The Slavic languages collection offers dictionaries and works on linguistics across all Slavic languages.

Music and Musicology

The musicology collections, available on open-access, are located on the fourth floor of the BCU/KUB. They serve the Department of Musicology and History of Musical Theatre at the University of Fribourg. We provide our users with up-to-date academic information resources.

The open-access collection comprises monographs, reference works, bibliographies and sheet music. It is catalogued according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.

This collection is supplemented by critical editions, pocket scores and individual scores, as well as a wide selection of CDs. Part of the collection, particularly the older items, is held in the BCU/KUB’s stacks and may also be borrowed. In addition, we offer access to numerous academic databases and electronic resources.