OCLC and the CIPE consortium, which comprises 11 university libraries in northern and central Italy, have signed an agreement to load CIPE library records into WorldCat.
OCLC and the CIPE consortium, which comprises 11 university libraries in northern and central Italy, have signed an agreement to load CIPE library records into WorldCat to increase visibility of these Italian collections, and enrich the world's largest resource for discovery of library materials.
The CIPE consortium (Consorzio Interistituzionale per Progetti Elettronici - Interistitutional Consortium for Electronic Projects) was founded in 2007 with the objective to promote national and international cooperation, research, standardisation, training and development of services for the consortium members aimed at library innovation and efficiencies of scale. Participating in CIPE are the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Padua, Parma, Pisa, Sassari, Siena, Venice and the Polytechnic University of the Marche. Some items in these collections date back to the 15th century.
The agreement to load the records of these leading public Italian universities will make them discoverable through WorldCat.org on the Web. "We have always been aware of the many benefits that WorldCat visibility can give us, and they are in line with our strategy of international cooperation," said Laura Tallandini, CIPE President and President of the Padua University Library System. "Now, we can have our records batchloaded into WorldCat and still continue to use our current cataloguing system. So we decided it was a good time to add our records to WorldCat and share them through WorldCat.org. The Consortium is very proud to say that thanks to the agreement CIPE signed with OCLC, all other University libraries-even if they are not CIPE members-can batchload their data in WorldCat under similar terms."
Renato Tamburrini, CIPE Director, and the University of Siena Library Director Guido Badalamenti, who is also a CIPE Board member, said they strongly support the decision to add these records to WorldCat.
"Since academic research activity is going to be more and more international, we believe it is an added value to provide one resource-WorldCat-for all the information, besides the union catalogue in Italy," said Mr. Badalamenti. "After this batchload, Italian end-users will finally be able to find our library items, in addition to items from other libraries around the world, in one search, regardless of their infrastructure and location."
"We find the WorldCat utilities very useful," said Mr. Tamburrini. "We feel good about OCLC's commitment to connecting libraries and people, and its ideology of sharing resources, which is the essence of CIPE."
"The addition of these records will almost quadruple the current Italian-language content and will enrich WorldCat with rare and precious materials from institutions that have been building collections for centuries," said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director of OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa. "Researchers and students around the world will benefit from access to these collections."
The records of the CIPE universities are in UNIMARC format and will first be converted by OCLC before batchloading is done for each university. Once the records are added to WorldCat, the consortium can take advantage of other OCLC services made available through WorldCat.
The agreement between CIPE and OCLC was facilitated by Ifnet Srl, OCLC's distributor in Italy. "This is the most important agreement since the beginning of our collaboration in 1992," said Gabriele Lunati, Ifnet Managing Director.