The access to scientific information complying with quality criteria, exhaustivity and timeliness, is a target any documentation centre ought to aim at. This is vital especially in those services operating within the health boards that account for biomedical research and the citizens’health among their institutional tasks.
For this very reason, considering the relevance of the role accomplished, the idea to set up a co-operation network between the Italian Biomedical Research Boards has gained ground. This network supposedly allows to share the available resources so as to rationalize the purchase policy and to enhance the future investment of the consortium, thus increasing the biomedical document holding made available to the whole Italian scientific community.
From the organizational viewpoint, each joining board has to assure the minimum co-operation required (human resources, tools and equipment, compliance with the regulation), as well as the implementation of an automated catalogue and tools apt to manage the communication and exchange (information about the single libraries, opening hours, inquiry search interfaces, document delivery requests, holding data refreshment masks, alerts, usage reports, etc.) in a transparent, fast and usable way. It is an operational project, whose strategic relevance is common knowledge, since it is targeted to lay the foundations of a national co-operation between every scientific library and/or Biomedical Documentation Centre ruled by the Ministry of Health. As a matter of fact, the selection of the ICTs implied, i.e. the innovative information and communication technologies introduced by the Internet (on-line journals and catalogues, e-journals and OPACs, as well as the DD, Document Delivery Services onto the www), is noteworthy.
The boards involved depend on the main Italian biomedical Research Boards, such as 32 IRCCS (Istituti di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico, Scientific Recovery and Treatment Institutes), 10 IZS (Istituti Zooprofilattici Sperimentali, Zooprophylactic Experimental Institutes), ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Superior Health Institute), ISPESL (Istituto Superiore per la Prevenzione e la Sicurezza del Lavoro, Work Prevention and Safety Superior Institute) and the Italian Ministry of Health. |