AIB. Commissione nazionale università e ricerca
AIB-WEB | Le Commissioni | Commissione università ricerca

Projects

SBBL: virtual library, real service / Enrica Veronesi [*]

The Regione Lombardia established the Sistema Bibliotecario Biomedico Lombardo (SBBL) with law n. 41 of December 12^th, 1994 as the conclusion of a project begun in the '70s which was only made possible by the idea of a virtual library as opposed to that of a real library. The core ('Poli') of the system now consists of 16 libraries belonging to univeristies, IRCCS and research institutes, which are coordinated by the Centro di Riferimento Regionale at the Dipartimento di Farmacologia Medica dell'Università degli Studi di Milano.

SBBL aims at making available the experience and collections of important libraries in Lombardy to health professionals who work in external structures, including small ones. The idea is to favour a rapid diffusion of biomedical information, achieving an economy of scale and improving resources and knowledge.

After deciding that the Internet was the most appropriate medium, a network of libraries involved as service suppliers was built and then it was opened to those allowed to access it. A union catalogue of the periodicals owned by the supplying libraries was put together and it is now in its third edition, both on paper and cd rom. The catalogue was used to outline and restrict overlapping titles and to discover which subject areas were poorly represented. The SBBL catalogue will soon be available online for the Internet location of journals and for the online handling of document delivery, which is rapidly increasing.

Rules for the services were established; so far more than 70 libraries and research institutes are allowed to submit requests.

Training courses for the librarians of the institutions involved were carried out in order to teach them the rules of the service and the use of the databases.

A Web page was created, containing information for users.

The most important services available free of charge to registered users are:

• access to MEDLINE and EMBASE (OVID version) with the links to the journals recorded in the SBBL catalogue;
• online search of the SBBL union catalogue;
• document delivery and supply;
• full-text access to several periodicals, limited to the 'Poli' (core libraries) (first consortium contract with Elsevier for Science @direct).

SBBL server is hosted at the CILEA's servers (Segrate – Milano).

Planned developments will:

• widen the number of libraries and institutions supplying the service;
• make more databases and full-texts available;
• expand the number of disciplines covered by the catalogue;
• promote Evidence Based Medicine;
• organize training courses;
• increase the registered users;
• monitor the use of the services and collect users' advice.