Atlantis s.r.l., the exclusive distributor of Ex Libris products in Italy, recently signed a contract with the Bank of Italy for the latest version of ALEPH 500™, the integrated library management system. ALEPH 500 will replace the bank`s current BIBLNEW system and its Fulcrum information retrieval system, both of which run on procedures specifically developed for use on Oracle.
The Bank of Italy established its own library in 1894, with a legal section and an economics section. In 1914 the library was divided, and the resulting units formed the basis of today`s law library and economics library. The latter was named for Paolo Baffi, Governor of the Bank of Italy from 1975 to 1979.
Specializing in Italian law as related to economics, the Biblioteca Giuridica (law library) has approximately 25,000 monographs and 370 serials, 250 of which are currently published. For many of these titles, as well as for contributed volumes (such as conference proceedings), the library produces systematic analytic records.
The Paolo Baffi Library contains about 100,000 monographs and more than 4,000 serials, of which 1,500 are currently published. This library specializes in economics, particularly in the areas of money, central banking, and the theoretical, historical, legal, and statistical aspects of banks and finance. In addition, the library devotes space to the social sciences. Its acquisition policy aims to ensure the availability of the most up-to-date Italian and international scientific publications related to economics and to obtain documents of historical value, such as the oldest portion of the library belonging to Lord Lionel Robbins, which was acquired in 1990.
Although the primary users of the Paolo Baffi Library are the bank staff, particularly the economists who work in the research department, the Library also offers bibliographic research, reference, microfilm, and photocopying services to non-institutional users, usually members of the academic and financial communities.
The Bank of Italy libraries devote considerable attention to the analysis of information. Since 1965, the libraries have performed partial or complete reviews of the articles published in over 480 major Italian and international economics periodicals and have also systematically reviewed numerous contributed volumes. The libraries house more than 230 series of working papers published by economic research institutions, 133 annual reports of various central banks, 30 annual reports of international institutions, and about 800 other annual publications, which are generally on statistical topics.
In 1964, the economics library ceased its manual production of catalog forms and began recording data on punched tape. Twenty years later, the same data were converted to record format, and the catalog became electronic. A relational database was created in 1987, to which all the data were migrated. The next step will take place in December 2002, when the records created in 1965 for the Paolo Baffi Library and in 1989 for the Biblioteca Giuridica will be migrated into a single bibliographic database running in ALEPH 500, with a total of about 490,000 bibliographic records.
In addition to the collections represented in its electronic catalog, the Paolo Baffi Library holds about 40,000 documents that were acquired before 1965 and are listed in a card catalog; approximately 11,000 volumes that were recently purchased from private collections and have not yet been cataloged; and 10,000 microfilms that provide access to Italian and international newspapers, the archives of the economists of the Cambridge School (J. M. Keynes, N. Kaldor, R. F. Kahn, Joan Robinson, and Austin Robinson), and the collections of the Goldsmiths`-Kress Library of Economic Literature and the Seligman Library. At the moment, the library of Piero Sraffa, which was collected at Trinity College, Cambridge (UK), is being reproduced on microfilm.
With the new ALEPH 500 software and the subsequent availability of library catalogs over the Internet, the Bank of Italy will be better equipped to answer all its information dissemination needs for both its institutional and non-institutional users.