The Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries (ICCU), Ministry of Culture (MiC), one of the ADELE project partners, has a deep expertise in digital resources management and launched last December the Alphabetica portal (www.alphabetica.it), a new digital ecosystem of national bibliographic services.
Alphabetica is a new research tool that integrates all the databases managed by ICCU in a single general catalogue with millions of bibliographic information and digital resources preserved in more than 6,500 Italian libraries that participate in the National Library Service and hundreds of partners collaborating in ICCU national projects.
Alphabetica allows users to access simultaneously all resources contained in: OPAC SBN catalogue of the National Library Service (SBN), Manus Online, related to the world of manuscripts, EDIT16, the National Census of Italian editions of the 16th century, the Digital Aggregator and SBNTeca, that collects millions of digital objects resulting from digitization activities conducted by 280 partner libraries of Internet Culturale and Italian libraries database, the census of Italian libraries.
The launch of Alphabetica also led to the renewal of some technical aspects such as the use of API and the use of the IIIF standard for images that allows interoperability with other digital realities coordinated by ICCU.
Users can simply type their search terms into the search bar or browse the contents through one of 9 specific paths: Protagonists, Music, Books, Manuscripts, Audio and Video, Cartography, Periodicals, Graphics, Libraries. The main strength of Alphabetica lies in the enhancement of the links between resources, also through dedicated widgets. Registered users (the service is free) can also create personalized collections and share them in the network, making the portal a useful tool also for education purposes.
Alphabetica has been created thanks to more than thirty years of collaboration with the National Library Service Network and with the support of the Sapienza University of Rome, the National Central Library of Florence, the National University Library of Turin, the Emilia Romagna Region, the Liguria Region, the Library System of the University of Padua and the Apostolic Library Vatican together with the technical partners of this project
For further information: ic-cu.alphabetica@beniculturali.it
