The SLA were officially inaugurated at the Swiss National Library in Bern in early 1991. The SLA assembles documents connected to the literature of all four linguistic regions of Switzerland: French, German, Italian and Romansh, with particular emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries. The Literary Archives hold today some 100 complete fonds and 120 partial fonds and collections.

There are several ways of looking for SLA documents:

• Alphabetical list of fonds and archives in the SLA
• Online inventories of the SLA
• Index of manuscript collections held in libraries and archives in Switzerland
  
• Helveticat

Furthermore the SLA oversee many important music manuscripts.