Il progetto WorldCat/OCLC del consorzio CIPE

CIPE is a Consortium of 11 Italian universities, that decided few year ago to act as an “icebreaker” in respect of the other Italian universities importing their 11 millions of records in Worldcat. Today most of the process has been completed and half of the data are available in the Catalogue yet, where we are expecting also the other data will be imported quite soon. It is interesting to note the significant increase in the ILL requests coming from foreigner institutions, thanks to the presence of our data in WorldCat. The more relevant reason behind the CIPE initiative is the need to bridge the gap of the Italian documentation not available on the web at the moment. The aims of the project are: a) giving more visibility to the librarian Italian heritage; b) sizing the opportunity of participating, via WorldCat, to VIAF and to structure the data thought linked data; c) encouraging the adhesion to the CIPE-WorldCat project from other Italian universities; d) promoting the relevance of the Italian research outputs in the International community and increasing the evaluation process of the national papers, with a specific attention to books. The achievement of the project represented also a good occasion for the libraries to revise their internal cataloguing process and routines, with the opportunity to clean the data and to correct errors in the catalogues thanks to the feedbacks of inconsistency highlighted from OCLC during the import of data. This way has been also possible for the CIPE members to develop a deeper know how regarding the SW functionalities and the import-export implications and problems in the ILS.