The digital era has challenged the libraries to find and test different ways to answer the ever growing user needs. The physical library of the past is about to be substituted by the library “without walls” through a process which compels to redefine the services and the role of people involved in the information environment. The authors describe the new user services offered by the Library of the Italian National Institute of Health, Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), in order to design a new Library model. These services have been realized in the framework of the following projects developed in the period 2001-2004:
· BIBLIOSAN, cooperative initiative among libraries and documentation centres of all Italian biomedical research institutions belonging to the National Health Service in Italy;
· WHO PORTAL, tool aimed to give visibility and spread information on the activities and services of the World Health Organization Centres operative at the ISS;
· DIGITIZATION OF THE LIBRARY HISTORICAL CATALOGUE;
· PIRAMIDE, interface developed by the ISS Documentation Sector in cooperation with the Library and the Data Management Sector of ISS which aims to connect journals indexed by PubMed and Italian libraries in order to retrieve documents locally or through DOCLINE;
· NLM LINKOUT SERVICE, project carried out by the ISS Editorial Sector in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine in order to participate in the LinkOut program: access from PubMed database to full text of articles of Annali dell’Istituto Superiore di Sanità.
These projects underline the current transition phase from the traditional framework to an increasing digital reality. As for the future, according to a global trend, also the ISS Library is moving to become more and more a service than a place. To this purpose it is working to integrate different information resources and to improve individualized services in order to grant a wider and an easier flow of information.
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