Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze

• 7,000,000 printed volumes
• 160,000 periodical titles of which 15,178 are current
• 4,000 incunabula, 25,000 manuscripts, 29,120 editions of the 16th century, 2,696,327 pamphlets and over 1,000,000 autographs.
• Since 2000, following a significant purchase by MiBACT, the heritage has been enriched with a collection – among the most important in the international scene – composed of over 4300 documents of art editions and artist books belonging to the Tuscan collector Loriano Bertini.
  It preserves about 12 terabytes of native or digitized digital resources.

The shelves of the book deposits currently cover 135 Km linearly, with an annual increase of over 1 and a half Km.

This wealth makes the BNCF one of the most important Italian libraries, as well as the only one that can document in its entirety the development of the cultural life of the Nation.

Originally it was located in premises that were part of the Uffizi complex; in 1935 it was moved to its current location, built, starting from 1911, on a design by architect Cesare Bazzani and later expanded by architect Vincenzo Mazzei. The building, one of the rare examples of library architecture, is part of the monumental area of the Santa Croce complex.

• It has produced since 1886 the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) and performs the function of national bibliographic agency, ensuring control over access to bibliographic information (authors, titles, subjects, classification numbers and headings).
• The BNI consists of six separate series (Monographs, Printed Music, Periodicals, School Books, Children’s Books, Doctoral Theses), available on paper, DVD or online. National Library Service (SBN) hub, it cooperates in its enhancement in coordination with the Central Institute for the Union Catalog of Italian Libraries and for Bibliographic Information (ICCU)
• It is configured as a research institute in the field of library science and in the application of new technologies particularly through the production and experimentation of standards on the preservation and use of digital format.
• It has developed the New subject headings, a new indexing tool by subject, which renews the previous one published in 1956. Since May 2013 Wikipedia (the free and collaborative encyclopedia available online in over 280 languages) offers in the External links section the link to the Thesaurus of the New subject headings.
  It has edited the Italian editions of the full and abridged Dewey Decimal Classification and today follows the online classification tool Web Dewey.
• It experiments with the collection, selection and long-term preservation of digital documents, including those on the web, also thanks to the Digital Warehouses project, started in 2006 with the Digital Renaissance Foundation, the National Central Library of Rome and the Marciana Library of Venice. The project has developed a system for the permanent preservation of electronic documents published in Italy and distributed via computer network, in implementation of the legal deposit legislation (L. 106/2004, D.P.R. 252/2006).