An experience in cataloguing of electronic resources: the Italian Telematic Library (BIT)

Abstract

The Italian Telematic Library (Biblioteca Italiana Telematica, BIT) came into being in 1997 as an inter-university research project of national interest. Its aim was to make texts of Italian culture available in digital form through the work of about twenty research groups, in different subject fields, of fifteen universities, who had formed the CiBit consortium (Interuniversity Centre for the Italian Telematic Library), with headquarters in Pisa.
The BIT is a digital library of texts of Italian culture that date from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. They are mainly, but not exclusively, literary texts "of controlled origin". This means that they are digitized, marked up and controlled by specialized teams following strict philological criteria, organized within a coherent library architecture with bibliographical and cataloguing standards that are accepted at national and international level.
The analysis and implementation of library features and, more specifically, of the catalogue structure of the BIT have been entrusted to one of the research units of the University of Pisa, coordinated by A. Petrucciani. The unit was also responsible for the digitization of a selection of "classical" works of Italian bibliography and librarianship from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century.
Thanks to cooperation with the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the National Research Council (CNR) of Pisa, the DBT (Textual Data Base) programme developed by Eugenio Picchi in the Applet Java version was used in the first stage of the project; for the sake of standardization a software program for the automatic conversion of the DBT coding into SGML/TEI markup was written and tested.
The Web site of the Italian Telematic Library with DBT software was accessible until the Autumn of 2002 at the URL <http://cibit.humnet.unipi.it>. However, in 2002 the structure of the site was reconsidered in the light of recent developments and it was agreed to change from the DBT software and markup to newer and better options. The new site is accessible since May 2003 at the URL <http://dante.di.unipi.it/ricerca/>, with a search engine of new conception developed at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. It was also decided to adopt the XML/TEI markup.
Moreover, for the catalogue functions of the BIT (identification and selection of one or more texts with given characteristics, e.g. type, genre, period, etc.) it was realized that there was a need for a modern and powerful library system that would use a standard format (UNIMARC) and that would be able to overcome the limits of a search engine or of an ad hoc database application, typical of most "digital libraries". The choice of a standard format for bibliographic data is seen as a qualifying element of the BIT programme.