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The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Library System

The largest Catholic University in Europe, founded in Milan in 1921 by Father Agostino Gemelli, consists of 5 campuses across the whole of Italy (Milano, Brescia, Piacenza-Cremona, Roma and Campobasso) 14 faculties and counts more than 42,000 students, 56 Ph.D degree programs, more than 100 master degrees, 53 specialization and 6 postgraduate schools such as ALTIS and ASERI .

These are the key numbers of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

Library System

The University's original inspiration finds its full accomplishment in the university Library, the very heart of knowledge, furthering research and teaching activities within UCSC. The integrated UCSC Library system was established in 1921 by the university's founder Father Agostino Gemelli, who based its design and organisation on that of highly prestigious foreign libraries. It reflects the national dimensions of the University with its five campus libraries in Milan, Brescia, Piacenza-Cremona, Rome and Campobasso providing effective support to both teaching and research activities of the Università Cattolica.

Keeping pace with the rapidly changing world of information is one of the main objectives of our Library System, providing essential support to the University's most important and prestigious activities and to the whole Scientific Community. These full-service campus libraries serve the disciplines of individual faculties and are provided with a multiplicity of facilities aimed at assuring the fastest access to all documentation and information available through a single OPAC shared by each of them.

The entire UCSC library's collection consists of over 2 million volumes, more than 32,000 print titles journals and 12,000 electronic journals.

Information Literacy courses are offered to UCSC students, in order to give them support and guidance in searching the OPAC, as well as bibliographic and full text resources.

The faculties of Economics are located in Milan, Piacenza and Rome, so are the subject-specific collections of paper-based resources, while electronic journals and databases are accessible from all campuses.

The Economics Branch of the UCSC Library holds documents relating to political economics, business administration (accounting, marketing, management, strategy), finance, mathematics and statistics. The collections cover a period from the late nineteenth century to the present, and include tens of thousands of monographs, about 1,000 periodicals in print, thousands of electronic journals and about 50 bibliographic and statistical databases, including EconLit , Business Source Premier (EBSCO), Bankscope and Orbis (Bureau van Dijk), Datastream, as well as the databases of the World Bank, IMF and OECD and the official United Nations publications.

Institutional Repositories

The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore started DocTA - Doctoral Theses Archive in 2008, as pilot project of Institutional Repository. It contains all the doctoral theses of Milan and Piacenza campuses as from academic year 2005/2006 and keeps growing constantly.

Digital Project preservation - international community initiative

The Library of the Università Cattolica is a governing library 'archive node' in CLOCKSS community and LOCKSS.

Digital Library Projects

The Catholic University has been developing several digital library projects over the last decade.
Current projects:

• Knowledge Discovery Tools: a new interface called ENCORE UCSC. The aim is to provide users with a simple, but powerful, way to search all available resources. Extensive facets usage will enable patrons to seamlessly navigate through local and external resources
• Virtual Reference Desk: a dedicated team of skilled librarians is already providing professional advice via e-mail to patrons, through the Ask@Librarian service. New features are being developed, in order to improve response time to enquiries and enhance the completeness of available information
• OPAC Content Integration: an ever increasing percentage of OPAC records are being enriched with additional information (i.e.: abstracts and table of contents). New functionalities are now under scrutiny, especially in the multimedia field, in order to keep pace with innovation.