The department offers a Library as a service for the students of the undergraduate and postgraduate study programs, as well for professors and researchers of the whole University. 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'' (MIF Library). At the end of 2001, slightly ahead to the rest of the department, the Library was physically merged to those of the Dipartimento di Matematica and the Dipartimento di Fisica in the new building at Polo Fibonacci. The MIF Library now contains over 40,000 books and more than 1250 periodicals, with more than 300 active subscriptions, and is therefore an important knowledge source in the three cultural areas that it covers. 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, through its web site
http://www.bibmif.unipi.it/A shift to online-only subscriptions is currently taking place, with several journals now being available only through web access.
The Library contents are indexed in the centralized index of all libraries of the Università di Pisa, that can be consulted with any web browser at the address
http://sba.adm.unipi.it:4505/ALEPHThe system also handles the borrowing of books, providing availability information for each book and sporting bar-code readers for quick borrowing procedures.
The Library has nearly 180 seated places for books and periodicals consultations in loco, with 14 computers for consulting the index and performing bibliographical searches; on average, about 70 books are borrowed every day, and it is estimated that more than 300 persons spend some time in the Library every day. 10 full-time employees of the Library take care of all the organizational aspects of the Library life, as well as assisting the users in their needs.
For 2005, the Dipartimento di Informatica has contributed to the budget of the Library, either directly or indirectly, with about 65,000 Euro, to be used entirely for new books acquisition and renewal of periodicals subscriptions.