National OPAC SBN

OPAC SBN Nazionale is the collective catalogue of the National Library Service (SBN), the network of Italian libraries promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, by the Regional Authorities, and by the Universities.

Public libraries, local authorities, universities, public and private institutions operating in various disciplinary sectors all subscribe.

You can perform two types of research on the entire SBN catalogue:

• Search in the catalogue: free search (single field) that retrieves the bibliographic information containing the words typed by the user in the optional fields: author, title, subject, classification number and description, all fields (all those listed above)
• Advanced search: search through multiple channels that can be selected from a drop-down menu, with the possibility of inserting additional search filters

In the catalogue you can find:

• descriptions of documents acquired by SBN libraries, starting from around 1990 or from the entry into SBN of individual libraries
• "book in hand" descriptions of documents from the 15th - 21st centuries
• descriptions recovered from paper catalogues prior to 1990

To search specific types of documents, you can access subsets of the SBN catalogue through subnet masks that present specific search channels:

• modern book (monograph publications starting from 1831 and periodical publications without date limits)
• ancient book (monograph publications from the 15th century until 1830)
• music (handwritten music, printed music, librettos from the 15th to the 21st century, audio recordings)

• graphics (graphic, manuscript and printed documents, drawings, engravings, photographs)
• cartography
• audiovisuals (musical and non-musical sound recordings, videos, documents to be projected)