Activities and Projects

The Project intends to enhance the Library’s Ancient and Rare Fund through a process that starts from the computerized cataloguing of works and volumes and reaches exhibition experiences, in order to start cultural processes and spread the knowledge of the history of Jesuit libraries.

To promote the Library and, at the same time, to encourage a first orientation, information brochures are disseminated and regularly updated both in Italian and English. Users are constantly updated also through notices on initiatives projected on monitors distributed in the University buildings. All activities are part of a broader advertising relaunching plan which involves the creation of a library guide and the divulgation of spaces, collections and services through virtual visits. Some gadgets are also in preparation thanks to which the user will be able to keep the memory of the Gregorian experience.

Library considers the review plan of collections a costumary activity to be carry out with the support of Theaching Staff. The aim is modernize the documentary patrimony, and aligning it with interests of the academic community. The periodicals collection, particularly subject to greater obsolescence, requires special attention, especially in its current section. The section of closed periodicals also is regularly reviewed, with the aim of descarding titles, that have lost their scientific and academic value. As for current monographic section, the first discard occurs already in the acquisition phase of the books, when choosing whether or not to buy the volume proposed by the publishing market, adopting criteria of opportunity and context. It is useful to reaffirm nature technique of the operation, professional prerogatives of the librarian, the only one able to assess the importance of the work within the library's documentary heritage, the specifications characteristics of the volume, its physical condition, and to supplement that information with equally factors determinants such as book circulation and bibliographic documentation. Therefore the Library has set up a "waste warehouse" where it collects discarded documents leaving them available to institutions that request it; only in extremis and almost exclusively for periodicals is it carried out annually sending to pulp for paper recycling.

The activity, carried out in close collaboration with the Library Council and with the entire teaching staff, provides that, on the basis of assessments on the opportunity, relevance and validity of the documents examined, the general works relating to the disciplines subject of study and research will be available on open shelves. Since the Reading Rooms can accommodate only a minimal part of the monographic collection, in order to allow direct access to general and fundamental works it is necessary a continuous revision aimed at the requalification and updating of the collection. 

With the Parsifal Project the URBE Network offers to users a unique tool for accessing all catalogs of the Libraries of the Network, on the basis of an integrated information system. The shared catalog best represents the documentary richness of the participating Libraries, integrating the considerable knowledge base represented by the set of bibliographic records present in the individual catalogs and enriching it with the new and evolving one generated by the Web.