Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali - Direzione Generale Beni Librari e Istituti Culturali, Italy

In the field of Information Society the main projects the Ministry for cultural heritage and activities - Direzione Generale Beni Librari e Istituti Culturali is carrying out are:

• Development of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (National Library Service)
• Carrying out of the "Piano d'azione MEDIATECA 2000"
• Creation of Italian Digital Library
• CREMISI

The activity of the Ministry mainly aims at fostering and improving integrated services among archives, libraries and museums. Some key areas for co-operation have already been identified. Cultural heritage institutions should work in order to find out tools and standards, not only for sharing their information resources but also for facilitating integrated access for end users.
SBN - Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (National Library Service) - is the Italian network created by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities in co-operation with the Regions and Universities. At the moment there are about 1200 libraries participating in the SBN network. The SBN Index contains the Union Catalogue of the libraries which are part of the network. It can be consulted by users via terminals at their local library or via personal computers connected to Internet, and browse the bibliographic databases of SBN OPAC or carry out complex searches (URL: http://opac.sbn.it).
"Piano d'azione Mediateca 2000" is a strategic plan undertaken by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities in order to strengthen and support the change from traditional libraries to multimedia libraries through the creation or the improving of new services, as well as providing them with technological infrastructures.
The Italian Digital Library is a project aiming to create an organic system, accessible via Internet, of digital collections realised through the co-operation among different libraries, cultural institutions, archives, museums, publishers, information and media sectors. The project will deal with both, digitised documents and digital born documents.
CREMISI project, promoted by the Ministry and funded within the programme ADAPT, realised open distance learning training courses in the field of multimedia and IT devoted to librarians, and provided libraries with multimedia services and multimedia classrooms for training.