Collection development
The policy adopted in the development of the collections revolves around the following criteria:
- to guarantee the presence of the tools that are indispensable for information, and for general, specialist and interdisciplinary research, not necessarily only with strict reference to the ongoing activity;
- to guarantee the updating of the specialist literature with particular reference to the teaching and research activity of the Scuola Normale;
- regarding the online and digital collections, to which considerable resources are dedicated, to adopt criteria of permanence and stability of access to the contents and of the relevance of themes to the fields of study;
- to build up the collections on the basis of our users' suggestions for acquisition, integrated with the resources selected by the librarians;
- purchases of monographs and printed editorial series are managed by the Acquisitions Service, purchases of e-collections are managed in collaboration by the Administrative Secretary's Office and the Purchasing Service, while the Periodicals Office manages the periodicals;
- to assign the task of selecting the gifts of individual works to the library staff themselves, who assess their coherence with the subject areas of interest to the users;
- to assign the task of approving acquisitions of complete collections from private sources to the Board of Directors of the Scuola Normale on consultation with the Scientific Committee of the Library.