The Italian National Bibliography today

Abstract

The statistics on the records produced for the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) in the last decade evidence a stable development with a growing trend. In the face of that, there has been a decrease of human resources never seen before in the history of the National Central Library of Florence (BNCF), that has drastically reduced the editorial staff of BNI to few units. The institutional tasks of BNCF, provided by law, have not changed though. Among these is the archival function for the Italian bibliographic production and its representation through adequate cataloguing and bibliographic instruments.

Therefore, in order to either maintain constant or increase BNI from a quantity point of view, by preserving its quality, some variations of a technical and organizational-managerial nature have been recently implemented, pursuing the following: 

1. Rapidity of cataloguing; 2. Full implementation of the recommendations of the Central Institute for the General Catalogue of the Italian Libraries and for the Bibliographic Information (ICCU) as regards, for instance, cataloguing regulations, use of the codes of bibliographic qualification, creation and management of the authority files regarding personal names and uniform title; 3. Constant attention to the role of BNCF in the cooperation within the National Library Service (SBN).

There are plans to intervene in some critical difficulties that still remain. The emergency due to Covid-19 pandemic has imposed a de facto meaningful and unpredictable reorganization of the work management (from the legal deposit to BNI and to the BNCF catalogue) through methods that could certainly be maintained even in future.