Activities and Projects

To guarantee timely, dynamic and simple assistance on services and resources, the "Ask the librarian" live chat has been implemented, a service that answers in real time to any question regarding the Library. The chat, with widgets present on all Library web pages, is active from Monday to Friday, from 11:00 to 12:00 a.m.

The Library has joined the NILDE system, a network of national and international libraries willing to share their bibliographic resources in a spirit of mutual collaboration, in compliance with copyright law and licensing agreements with publishers. This adherence aims to guarantee users the maximum speed in locating, requesting and supplying documents, to facilitate the dissemination and use of homogeneous and shared quality standards, to encourage inter-library cooperation.

The Library Charter of Services describes the prerequisites and methods for the provision of services by libraries in order to facilitate relations with users and in compliance with the principle of transparency. The Charter supports the management of libraries as it defines the basic cultural project and identifies the stages of the improvement process. It constitutes a real pact with users, an information and communication tool that allows them to know the services offered, to check the methods and standards guaranteed, to ascertain that the commitments undertaken are respected, to express assessments also through forms of complaint. The adoption of the Charter of the quality of services in academic libraries is an initiative aimed at promoting the widest exploitation of the cultural heritage preserved in them and at adapting, as far as possible, the organization of activities and services to users' expectations, in harmony with the needs of teaching, research and heritage protection, and therefore with the mission of the library. The Charter is updated regularly to consolidate the quality levels achieved and record the changes that have occurred through the implementation of improvement projects.

The implementation of the OpenAthens technology for remote access to Library electronic resources has made it possible to provide the Academic Community with a service now essential for every University. OpenAthens is an identity and access management service that communicates in real time with the database of the General Secretariat, identifying users through their institutional credentials; it has been chosen among the various products available on the market as it provides a wide guarantee of compatibility with the various technologies used by publishers for their Web platforms and because it allows convenient and simple management by the Library staff.

In the quality assessment process and 8 years after the previous survey, a questionnaire on the Library and its services was administered to users. Periodic performance measurement is essential to set up a medium and long term strategic plan. While data collection describes the performance of the library, it is the subsequent analysis that allows its evaluation, putting in place the comparison between what a library is doing (performance), what it has to do (institutional task), and what it would like to do (purpose). Therefore the questionnaire provided detailed information on users' opinion on services and heritage, highlighted users' needs and also proposed, as often happens, solutions to some critical issues, allowing the Library to to structure some services differently and to foresee others that go in the direction of a full satisfaction of the user experience of the Library.