The Library of the department is a service for the students of the undergraduate and postgraduate study programs, as well for professors and researchers of the department. The Library has been established in 1970, when the ``Corso di laurea in scienze dell'informazione'' was started. Since the beginning of 1997, the Library has joined the libraries of the Departments of Mathematics and Physics in the ``Biblioteca Interdipartimentale dei Dipartimenti di Matematica, Informatica e Fisica dell'Università di Pisa'', due to the perspective of physically merging the three libraries in a new building in the future. While the integration of the three libraries is being actively planned, the Library is still physically and organizationally a part of the department.
Initially, the Library has served a mainly didactic purpose due to two factors:
Over the years, however, the library has largely extended its research collection, especially with regard to journals and conference proceedings, and now is a key reference source for all the research done in the department.
The Library has currently around 12,200 books, with an increment of
about 400 books per year, and 96 subscriptions to journals (see
Appendix ![[*]](cross_ref_motif.gif)
). The library also offers to its users access
to a growing number of periodicals, journals and conference
proceedings available in electronic format over the WWW.
It serves an average of 70 users per day, if one considers both the borrowings and the consultations in loco. For 1998 the Library had a budget from the Department of about Lit. 141.000.000.
The library has a fully computerized index, following the ACM Computing Review classification rules. The index can be consulted either locally or with any web browser at the address http://waisbiblio.di.unipi.it/. The system also handles the borrowing of books, providing availability information for each book: reservations can be done directly from the web browser by registered users.