The MetaOPAC Azalai Italiano (MAI): Geography and evolution of Italian online catalogues

The purpose of this paper is to consider and discuss some data about the evolution of Italian Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) in the last decade and the possibility to search them cumulatively through the MetaOPAC Azalai Italiano (MAI). Scholars all over the world are interested in Italian OPACs due to the treasures and the historical documents owned by Italian libraries. After a brief introduction on union and virtual catalogues, with special attention to the Italian scenario, Italian OPACs are illustrated with a rich amount of data about their usage, their geographical distribution, and their growth. All data are available on the web and have been collected in the time through the analysis of log files and the database of the Italian OPACs. The evolution of Italian OPACs suggests new developments of MAI, such as extension of search to some contents of digital libraries. These are studied and, as far as allowed by the available human resources, progressively adopted in order to improve the quality of the metasearch. As this tool has no exact parallels in other countries, this paper mainly adopts a descriptive and heuristic approach, rather than evaluating MAI in comparison with other services. Although a wide amount of literature on MAI is available, only a few papers are in English. This paper then aims to increase the knowledge of MAI for a broadest group of non‐Italian readers.