The beginnings

The Milan campus Library was established in 1921 by the university's founder Father Agostino Gemelli, who based its design and organisation on that of highly prestigious foreign libraries.
Thanks to the acquisition of entire collections from eminent scholars the library already possessed 50,000 books and 210 scientific journals by the time the university opened its academic doors.
A careful purchasing policy together with numerous bequests enabled it to enrich its bibliographic assets quickly and by 1934 it already owned a good 250,000 volumes.

More info (in Italian) in:

E. BARBIERI - E. SADA, Per una storia della biblioteca dell'Università Cattolica, in Storia dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore: le istituzioni, vol. V: I patrimoni dell'Università Cattolica, a cura di M. BOCCI - L. ORNAGHI, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2013, p. 243-293.

The development

The bequests left to the Library by leading scholars or their heirs as recognition of the University's reputation and quality guarantee deserve a special mention. Of particular interest are the archives of the Pallavicino, di Scipione and Sforza Fogliani d'Aragona families, which are kept among the manuscript section documents. The highly valuable Negri da Oleggio Library, a collection bequeathed by Count Vincenzo Negri da Oleggio and owned by the Istituto Giuseppe Toniolo di Studi Superiore (founding institution and promoter of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) forms a precious collection housed in one of the University's palatial rooms. The collection consists of around 7,500 volumes and pamphlets dealing with the history of Lombardy and Northern Italy; it conserves an original diploma of Matilde di Canossa (9 January 1106), a group of 30 manuscripts, an incunabulum, 60 books printed in the 16th-century and a collection of 18th and 19th-century editions of literature and historiography.

Today

The main trait of the Milan campus Library is its centralized structure, consisting of a great central library located in the Gregorianum building, as well as many branch libraries located near various institutes and departments throughout the campus, at the service of the nine faculties that make up the University.
All purchase suggestions are sent to the central acquisitions office. The purchased publications are first catalogued and classified and are then made available to readers either through the library lending system or for consultation at the central distribution counter or at various distribution points in the branch library.

The Library has a rich and prestigious reference room arranged on two levels dedicated to Professor Giuseppe Billanovich, where scholars can directly access the bookcases and the multidisciplinary bibliographic collection housed there. The 'Giuseppe Billanovich Reference Room' has about 85,000 volumes of bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, indexes, general works and collections of sources, texts, critical editions and commentaries. This room is used not only by the UCSC teaching staff and students but also by scholars from all over Italy.

The Library is endowed with a total of 12 reading and consultation rooms and has seating for 1350 users. The main reading room and other rooms found in the library sections of the institutes and departments are reserved for consulting library material, but if space allows they are also available to UCSC students to study their own texts.

In recent years, the Library has purchased a notable range of CD-ROM and online bibliographic, textual, and numeric information sources for its users.
The opening of the Media Library (Via S. Agnese 2) in 2001 also gave the Milan campus an important didactic and scientific resource at the service of all the courses instituted in the Communication and Entertainment disciplinary field (arts, literature and art study pathways; cultural heritage, study pathways in cinema, theatre, video and rituality, media language).

The Milan campus Library offers its users a wide range of services, such as:

• bibliographical information service online (Ask a librarian) and in person to help and assist in bibliographical research
• Interlibrary loan and document delivery
• training courses

The Milan campus Library also organizes and promotes within its premises significant cultural and educational events such as exhibitions for its users and meetings for professional librarians.

The New Century Library

The Library launched its automation project towards the end of 1986 and in 1996 a decision was taken to convert all its paper-based journal and monographic catalogues into electronic format. The project came on stream in June 1996 initially with the journal catalogue which was completed in 1998, thus enabling users to access the electronic catalogue to retrieve the e-journals possessed by the Library, the year of each title and their location.
Between November 1998 and March 2001, partly as a result of financing from MIUR (Italian Ministry for the University and Scientific and Technological Research) and the Cariplo Foundation, a project was undertaken to convert into electronic format UCSC's entire paper-based catalogue, encompassing those of the Milan, Brescia and Piacenza/Cremona campus libraries.

Therefore since April 2001 it has been possible to consult the entire holdings of the UCSC Integrated Library System online and worldwide through the OPAC, enabling users the world over to explore the catalogue, and enabling patrons to submit loan and consultation requests via the Internet from the comfort of their own place of study or work.