A Consortium of Italian Universities Will Add 11 Million Records to WorldCat

From OCLC:

OCLC and the CIPE consortium, which comprises 11 university libraries in northern and central Italy, have signed an agreement to load CIPE library records into WorldCat to increase visibility of these Italian collections, and enrich the world’s largest resource for discovery of library materials.
The CIPE consortium (Consorzio Interistituzionale per Progetti Elettronici – Interistitutional Consortium for Electronic Projects) was founded in 2007 with the objective to promote national and international cooperation, research, standardisation, training and development of services for the consortium members aimed at library innovation and efficiencies of scale. Participating in CIPE are the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Padua, Parma, Pisa, Sassari, Siena, Venice and the Polytechnic University of the Marche. Some items in these collections date back to the 15th century.
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The Consortium is very proud to say that thanks to the agreement CIPE signed with OCLC, all other University libraries—even if they are not CIPE members—can batchload their data in WorldCat under similar terms.”
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The addition of these records will almost quadruple the current Italian-language content and will enrich WorldCat with rare and precious materials from institutions that have been building collections for centuries,” said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director of OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Researchers and students around the world will benefit from access to these collections.”

Read the Complete Announcement

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