Short notes on the ACNP Catalogue

The catalogue originated from the National Union Archive of Periodicals (ACNP) and was born in the 70’s under the initiative of the ISDRDS-CNR. It contains the bibliographic descriptions of periodicals/serials owned by the Italian libraries all over the country and covers all subject areas. The libraries of the University of Bologna joined the catalogue in 1981. The story of ACNP (in Italian).

Since 1988 the “Centro Inter-bibliotecario (Area Sistemi Dipartimentali e Documentali, then Area Biblioteche e Servizi allo Studio)” of the University of Bologna made this catalogue available online to scientific community on its own Information Retrieval system. According to an agreement with the CNR (National Research Council of Italy), the University of Bologna has committed itself to develop a program to update the catalogue by the adhering libraries.

The whole register of serials published by the "ISSN International Centre" was acquired and stored in order to simplify the catalogue update.

The ISSN Agency assigns a standard number (International Standard Serial Number) to uniquely identify serials and it represents a valuable tool for librarians who are able to “capture” the bibliographic description of serials not included in the catalogue. However authorized users can access the “Repertorio ISSN” from a specific link.

In addition to internal information resources and to complete the documentation on periodicals, an Archive of table of contents and abstracts was realized and integrated into the ACNP catalogue. The procedure allows users to shift searching from catalogue to Archive and vice versa in a transparent manner. The authorized users can directly access the Archive user interface from the “Repertorio articoli” containing about 9 million articles, mainly derived from ISI Current Contents. The ISI Current Contents data were being updated until 2001, since 2002 a link to the Boston Server Erl is active.