Dear colleagues,

You may have noticed over the past few days that piles and boxes of books and journals have appeared in the LB main lobby. This is an early step in the redesign and renovation of ICTP's Library. Thanks to generous funding from an anonymous donor, ICTP has begun the task of digitising its book collection; once digitised, the materials are being shipped to Bookfarm, an antiquarian bookshop in Germany that promotes "A Second Life for Books" (https://bookfarm.de/en/). So far, approximately 7,000 Springer monographs have been digitised, removed from the Library, and are now on their way to a second life. The books remain a part of ICTP's permanent collection, but as digital resources.

In addition, some 1,200 linear meters of print journals are now available in electronic form through the library’s licenses or, in a few cases, can be retrieved via document delivery within 24 hours.

The freed-up library space will be repurposed to create new workspaces for the scientific community in the future.

Over the past few years the Library has steadily grown its digital resources. The collections now comprise approximately 53,000 print books and more than 4,400 current electronic periodicals, and about 30 which are only received in print. Catalogued e-books are over 52,000 and growing. Several thousand digital documents of different types are in the archives.

ICTP Library