Italian State university libraries

Abstract

The article presents the institutional background of Italian State university libraries, from the establishment of the Italian Ministry of Culture to the present day – going through the last decade of the 20^th century, when Legislative Decree 112/1998 proposed a new institutional organization of the State university libraries within the Universities. The main institutional and service tasks that State university libraries have to fulfil are supporting learning and research, preserving national heritage and providing proper spaces for public reading. The paper analyses the opportunities of interaction and cooperation with Universities and University libraries, as for – for instance – the purchasing policies (especially with regard to electronic resources) and the users' training and information sessions. Given the increasing compression of human and financial resources that hampers the daily management of libraries, inter-institutional cooperation nowadays is more desirable than ever. If on the one hand the plurality of tasks and functions of the State university libraries reinforces their vitality, on the other hand it adds an extra burden on the daily organisation and service management, because of the difficulty of arranging their human and financial resources and of giving the right space and visibility to their several institutional and service tasks.