Shared experience of an approval plan: the case of the University Library of the Catholic University of Milan

Abstract

The library system of the Catholic University of Milan provides makes its contribution to the formation offer of the universities of Milan, Brescia, Piacenza/Cremona and Rome with their 14 faculties to which we can add 53 master courses and 35 post graduate completion courses, reaching a grand total of 42,000 users between students, professors and outside users.
The patrimony of the library system distributed among the centres of the Padania area is channelled into a joint electronic catalogue. Each campus maintains a centralized structure for acquisition, cataloguing and shelf readying.
Besides the traditional forms of document acquisition, since 1998 the Milanese library has adopted the procedure of acquisition on a predefined profile, known as an approval plan. This is an agreement with a specialized provider by which the latest publications that correspond to a profile previously defined by the library, are chosen and sent to the library itself. The first approval plan, still standing, of the Catholic University, was drawn up in 1998 with Blackwell's. It relates to Anglosaxon publications on some subjects regarding business economics. The project was decisively extended in 1999 with the provider Casalini, for Italian publications on social sciences, pedagogy, economics, political science and subsequently psychology, Italian literature and culture and linguistics.
The established aims of this project are basically two: reduce the times that normally pass between the publication of the latest editions and their effective availability for library users and improve the growth of collections in sectors that for various reasons are incomplete or only recently established.