Introduction

The library of the National Health Institute (ISS) is the most important Italian library in the biomedical science field. It is primarily used by researchers, scientific and administrative personnel of the Institute (more than 2000 people) but it is also open to external users.

A brief glance at its structure is useful to explain the duties of our Institute and our researchers’ fields of interest. The ISS is currently made up of 20 laboratories – in an already approved reorganization they will soon merge into seven departments and two national centres – embracing several biomedical disciplines, such as cell biology, epidemiology, haematology, pharmacology, physics, environmental hygiene, veterinary medicine, toxicology and virology.

The library holds more than 200,000 volumes and almost 9000 periodicals. Total annual expenditure is €2.2 million, with €1.6 million invested in serials and journal subscriptions. The continual advance of information technology has greatly modified the way scientists and researchers use the libraries. All this has brought about the need to redefine the duties of libraries completely, modifying policies and strategies in order to manage the flow of information better so that we satisfy the new requirements of users.

In 2000 the ISS library began to develop a project to implement an intranet site that could provide access to any area of the Institute, to online services and to electronic resources related to information needs. Our efforts are especially concentrated on databases and electronic journals. For this purpose our library signed an agreement with CIBER/CASPUR, one of the three large Italian consortia for information sharing in electronic format. The initial terms of this agreement provided access to the Science Direct database with a link to more than 600 periodicals published by Elsevier, the most important scientific publisher.

The new intranet site was launched at the beginning of 2001 and, at first, internal users had free access to about 1100 online full-text journals and to a restricted selection of online databases. This scenario rapidly evolved under the pressure of numerous requests from our researchers and after two years we have activated connections with Kluwer, Wiley and Nature Publishing Group databases, as well as the principal scientific journals such as Science, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and others.