Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze

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

The shelving of the book deposits currently covers 135 linear km, with an annual increase of over 1.5 km.

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

Originally it was housed in premises that were part of the Uffizi complex; in 1935 it was transferred to its current location, built starting in 1911 based on a design by architect Cesare Bazzani and subsequently 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.

• Since 1886 it produces the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) and functions as the national bibliographic agency, ensuring control over accesses to bibliographic information (authors, titles, subjects, numbers and classification headings).
• The BNI consists of six separate series (Monographs, Printed Music, Periodicals, School Books, Children’s Books, Doctoral Theses), available in print, DVD or online National Library Service (SBN) network hub, cooperating for its enhancement in coordination with the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and 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 access of digital format.
• It has developed the New Subject Headings, a new indexing tool by subject, updating the previous one published in 1956. Since May 2013 Wikipedia (the free, 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 overseen the Italian editions of the full and abridged Dewey Decimal Classification and currently follows the online classification tool Web Dewey.
• It experiments in the collection, selection and long-term preservation of digital documents, also present on the web, thanks also to the Digital Warehouses project, started in 2006 with the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma and the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice. The project developed a system for the permanent preservation of electronic documents published in Italy and distributed through computer networks, in implementation of the legal deposit law (L. 106/2004, D.P.R. 252/2006).