Digital resource sharing and library consortia in Italy

Interlibrary cooperation in Italy is a fairly recent and not very widesprea d practice. Attention to the topic was aroused in the eighties with the Ita lian library network project. More recently, under the impetus toward techn ological innovation there has been renewed (and more pragmatic) interest in cooperation in all library sectors. Sharing electronic resources is the th eme of greatest interest today in university libraries, where various initi atives are aimed at setting up consortia to purchase licenses and run digit al products. A number of projects in hand are described, and emerging trend s analyzed.