Italian libraries
National library directories and online catalogs.
Formed in 1930, it is the professional association of Italian librarians. The objectives of its activities are: to promote a library service that takes users into consideration; to carry out the role of professional representation in every cultural, scientific, technical, legal and legislative sphere; and to support every useful action to guarantee qualified professional training.
The Vatican Library holds a very rich patrimony consisting of about 180,000 manuscript volumes, 1,600,000 printed books, more than 8,600 incunabula, 300,000 coins and medals, 150,000 prints, drawings and plates, and more than 150,000 photographs. Access is allowed only to scholars in the field and after the admission procedure.
The library has two locations: the historical room on the fourth floor of the Chigi Palace and the modern Sala delle Colonne, located on the second floor of the former monastery of San Silvestro in Capite, 96 Via della Mercede. The library holdings consist of about 30,000 volumes and 200 subscriptions to journals and periodicals. The bibliographic material is mainly of a legal-economic nature. Over the years, two new main collections have been established, focusing on bioethics, biotechnology and life sciences, for the documentation needs of the National Committee for Bioethics and the National Committee for Biotechnology, Biosafety and Life Sciences, which operate within the Presidency of the Council. The library also has the collection of laws and decrees of the Kingdom of Italy and the Italian Republic, the collection of the Italian Forum, commentaries on the Constitution and the Civil Code, and major legal encyclopedias.
At its headquarters in the Palazzo della Minerva, this library makes available a holdings consisting of 700,000 volumes, 3,000 periodicals and 600 Italian and foreign newspapers, the most important collection of statutes of municipalities and corporations from the late Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age, and much more. The Senate Library meets the expectations of a diverse public, particularly in the fields of law and legal history, history, local Italian history, political science, media history and journalism, and parliamentary documentation.
The Library of the Bank of Italy was established in 1894 and divided into two sections: the Economic Library and the Legal Library. In the 1930s, the two sections were separated, creating the Economic Library and the Legal Library. In addition to providing informational materials and specialized literature to Bank of Italy staff, both Libraries are open to the public, especially to professors, researchers, economists, jurists, experts from other institutions, and university students.
Established with the Commission in the early 1950s, the library is now the repository of Unesco documentary and bibliographical material in Italy and has more than 12,000 volumes, as well as about 400 periodicals mostly of an international nature, including the main Unesco journals.
The Central Library of the Court of Auditors is one of the largest national law libraries with a specialized character in the fields of public law, civil law, economics and public accounting, with sections devoted to history and social sciences. Over time, a fund dedicated to administrative source documentation (the so-called gray literature) has also been curated. It has a holdings of more than 250,000 volumes, which are constantly increasing, and more than 3,000 periodicals, both Italian and foreign, including current and discontinued ones. Open-shelf consultation allows direct access to a large part of the library holdings.
The more than 200,000 volumes and 17,500 periodicals held by the library are arranged in sections by major national areas, within which there are thematic-chronological divisions traced to the periodizations of each country’s political and social history. Specifically, the most significant library collections are those related to the political and economic thought of the Enlightenment (in France, Italy, Germany and England); the Italian Risorgimento with special attention to the economic discussion; the social dynamics accompanying the First Industrial Revolution in England; the European 1848 uprisings (with special attention to the Old Italian States; the Second French Republic, the Berlin and Vienna uprisings); and the Paris Commune; to the labor and socialist movement between the 19th and 20th centuries (in Britain, the U.S., Italy, France, Germany); to the history of the Internationals (First, Second and Third); to the Russian populist movement; to the political, ideological and economic vicissitudes of revolutionary Russia and then the USSR; to European fascisms; to Spain, from the Second Republic to the Civil War; to the events of the Prague Spring and Solidarity; to the political and social transformations of North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia in the 20th century.
The Alfredo Oriani Library is an institute specializing in contemporary history and political, economic and social studies, with a focus on fascism and anti-fascism, the history of political parties, the trade union movement and the labor movement, the history of political and social thought, and economic history. Its current holdings are approximately 170,000 volumes. This heritage is enriched by 1,200 periodicals, about 400 of which are current, with special emphasis on historical, political and economic journals.
Project created through the cooperation of the Academy of Hungary, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Netherlands, the Embassy of Switzerland, the British Council, the Austrian Forum of Culture, the Goethe Institut Rom, the Cervantes Institute Rome, the Polish Institute, the Slovak Institute, the Swiss Institute in Rome in concert with the Libraries Institution of the City of Rome, with the aim of creating through cooperative actions a European Library that promotes national cultures and languages to contribute to the construction of Europe and the formation of an awareness of European identity in Italian and non-Italian citizens.
The Library, established on May 10, 1899 as the Library of the Province of Rome and then from June 22, 1912 as the Library of the Provincial Council, is configured as a Library specializing in the history, art, popular traditions, customs, of the territory of Rome, the province and the Papal State and in the collection of volumes and documents that testify to the institutional activity of the Authority and the municipalities of the metropolitan area.
Rai has three libraries-two in Rome and one in Turin-and a documentation center-hemera library in Rome. The libraries are of a specialized type: in Rome there are books and magazines essentially related to the subjects of communication, adiovisual, entertainment and journalism, in Turin a library that collects only materials devoted to advertising.
Edited by the Turin Polytechnic University Library System, it includes many Italian libraries with a focus on university libraries.
Edited by ICCU (Central Institute for the Unique Catalogue) this is the list of the 6,320 Italian libraries that are members of the National Library System, divided into 102 Aggregation Poles.
It originated from the private library of Antonio Magliabechi, left in 1714, according to his will, “for the universal benefit of the city of Florence.” In 1737 it was established by decree that a copy of all works printed in Florence and from 1743 throughout the Grand Duchy of Tuscany be deposited there. In 1747 it was first opened to the public under the name Magliabechiana. In 1861 it was unified with the great Palatine Library and assumed the name Biblioteca Nazionale and from 1885 the appellation Centrale. Since 1870 it has received by right of printing a copy of everything published in Italy.
It was established in 1876 to endow the capital of the Kingdom of Italy with a great archive of books, an expression of national culture. The Roman College, an ancient and monumental building where the Bibliotheca Major of the Jesuits was already located, was chosen as its original nucleus. This nucleus was later enriched with funds from the libraries of religious congregations suppressed after the establishment of the unified Kingdom. After a century, on January 31, 1975, the new premises were inaugurated in the archaeological area of Castrum Praetorium. The National Central Library in Rome preserves all Italian publishing production, which it receives under the law on the compulsory deposit of printed matter. It also documents in its generality foreign culture, with special attention to the spread of Italian culture abroad. It preserves about 7 million volumes, 8,000 manuscripts, 2,000 incunabula, more than 25,000 cinquecentine and 20,000 maps, 10,000 among prints and drawings, in addition to those collected in volumes, and of 50,000 periodicals titles.
Within each type, catalogs are grouped according to their geographic coverage, and are identified by the names of the sets of libraries whose holdings they contain.
The collection brings together 220 historical volume and card catalogs from 38 Italian libraries belonging to the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Local Authorities and Institutes of Culture, with a total of 6,843,454 images.
The General Directorate of Libraries and Cultural Institutes, a central organ of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, performs functions and tasks of coordination and supervision in the field of state public libraries, national bibliographic and library services, cultural institutes, promotion of books and reading, intellectual property and copyright within the framework of the legislation under its jurisdiction.
It is the online catalog that provides access, in an integrated manner, to the documentary resources of civic, specialized, church, university, and cultural institutions libraries throughout Piedmont, regardless of the SBN Pole or the Library System to which they belong. In this sense it is a meta-catalog, because only a meta-engine can search for information within the different catalogs, built and implemented according to different logics.
This metaopac is suitable for searching for uncommon documents not found in other Italian catalogs. Using it as a primary search tool is inadvisable because it produces overabundant results. Through a mask, all catalogs currently connected to MAI are queried directly; a selective search by geographic area, library types, and document types; and a search by region are also available. Azalai was the name of the Salt Caravan from the Thousand Camels, a word that in the ancient Tuareg language meant “to separate and then rejoin again.” It took the Azalai nine months along the desert to transport its cargo of salt, which it exchanged for gold-the value of the salt of knowledge traded on par with gold. It was chosen this name to symbolize the path for the realization of the MAI: a challenge on several fronts, an arduous task of reconnaissance, route analysis, access control, defining scopes and territories, and difficult passages within areas not always reachable.
The IEI Pole has since 1987 initiated a program of sharing and coordinating its collections and their development and computerizing their respective catalogs through SBN cataloging software. Its collective catalog, which has more than one million online catalog entries, constitutes one of the notable sources for the study of history, social sciences, political thought and geographical culture in Italy and abroad.
It is the network of Italian libraries promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Regions and Universities, and coordinated by ICCU, aimed at user services. It is currently joined by more than 6,000 libraries including state, local government, university, public and private institutions, operating in different subject areas. Libraries participating in SBN are grouped into Local Poles consisting of a more or less numerous set of libraries that manage all their services with automated procedures. The Poles are in turn connected to the SBN Index system, the central node of the network, which contains the collective catalog of publications acquired by the libraries participating in SBN.
The URBE computer network, inaugurated in 1994, connects 18 ecclesiastical institutions of higher studies in Rome: 7 Universities (Angelicum, Antonianum, Gregorian, Lateran, Salesian, Holy Cross and Urbaniana), 1 Athenaeum (Anselmian), 6 Institutes (Augustinianum, Biblical, Arabic Studies and Islamistics, John Paul II, Christian Archaeology and Oriental), 2 Faculties (Auxilium and Marianum), 1 Academy (Alphonsian) and the Pro Unione Center. The Patrimony of the network, which each library manages independently for historical and legal reasons, is rich in more than 4 million volumes, with highly specialized funds especially in the field of theological disciplines, not related only to the Catholic Church, but with extensive documentation also in the ecumenical and other non-Christian religions.
URBS is a cultural association established in 1992 among research and academic institutions active in the humanities. The aims and purposes consist of sharing the catalog, resources and bibliographic research tools; promoting various forms of cooperation among libraries; collaborating with other scholarly institutions in participating in cultural activities, initiatives and projects that are characterized by similar aims to those pursued by URBS. There are 6 member libraries: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, Istituto Svizzero, Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut te Rome, LUMSA, Det norske institutt i Roma, Real Academia de España en Roma. The goal of the network, whose library holdings are predominantly oriented toward the humanities, is to provide its users with a coordinated collective catalog of specialized libraries in Rome.