born the online portal of Italian libraries, available to users 24 / 7 365 days a year. It's called MediaLibraryOnLine (MLOL) the first digital platform for loan for Italian libraries: one-click e-books, digitized books, videos and newspapers come into the hands of users, wherever they are.
MLOL allows the use of portals from their home library, as well as from Internet stations presenti nelle biblioteche che hanno aderito al progetto: registrandosi tramite la tessera d’iscrizione alla biblioteca, gli utenti possono connettersi gratuitamente alla piattaforma e accedere ai contenuti digitali raccolti sul sito. Da quel momento, attraverso MLOL, l’utente può – da casa o in biblioteca –, consultare banche dati ed enciclopedie, leggere le versioni edicola dei quotidiani o di altri periodici, ascoltare e scaricare audio musicali, visionare video in streaming, ascoltare e scaricare audiolibri, assistere in live-casting ad eventi organizzati dalle biblioteche o rivederne le registrazioni, consultare manoscritti e testi antichi in formato immagine e leggere libri digitalizzati attraverso tipologie diverse di e-book reader.
From the perspective of "borrowing digital" (digital lending) MLOL experiments with the two most widely used mode on the market today: streaming and download time. The user can stay connected to the network without overloading the PC - or to some publishers - download the content and makes him more comfortable when they see it without being connected online. In this case, the downloaded digital object will be accessible for a period that varies depending on the type of material and the publisher, basically between 15 days and one month, after which the object is no longer available.
platform currently collects 49,500 digital objects, 50% open access resources and 50% commercial, 16,500 music albums, 27,700 e-books (commercial + open access), 2,500 e-book business, 1,345 newspapers, 1,000 audio books, 2,550 videos, 120 databases, 180 learning objects, 150 iconographic collections.
The project, launched in March 2009, is sponsored by the Horizons Unlimited (Bologna) and now comprises about 1,000 libraries in four regions (Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria) with a reference population of approximately 8.5 million inhabitants . Objective 2011: to reach more than 1,500 libraries in at least six Italian regions.
The platform helps to streamline the costs for libraries, enabling you to monitor real-time access and demands. Costs are lowered further if we consider that the purchases are made by library systems (including pooled together) and not a single library. Join MLOL also allows you to lower the cost of logistics, clearing 3-6 in practice today is spent on average € per transaction lending (excluding content). Any conversion from analog to digital is almost zero transaction costs.
Today there are about 50 publishers and distributors in the digital platform for lending. Among others, Alexader Street Press (for music), NewspaperDirect (which aggregates about 1,250 newspapers from 89 countries in 39 languages), Casalini Libri (which brings with it a collection of 1,500 ebooks from 40 Italian publishers), Guaraldi Editore, Green Lion, Morellino, Archetype, Liguori, Sossella, Emons audiobooks, databases of Sole24Ore and other Italian operators. MLOL will also work with all the distribution platforms of e-books in Italy in 2011 to allow the loan of all the digital e-book on the Italian platform. The collection will grow so significantly in 2011 with the help of fiction and ranges of the major Italian publishers.
"We developed the platform MLOL - Giulio Blasi explains, managing director of Horizons - to respond to a real vacuum technology and business in Italian public libraries than the U.S.. How we have achieved to date from 2009, now puts the Italian libraries in a position of advantage over the American and European landscape since - starting late - we have tried to overcome the critical issues already encountered elsewhere. In particular, we are very happy to be saying MLOL as a universal access platform, a kind of open marketplace, digital content: it is a model very different from what has been seen in other European countries and the United States ".
tags: internet library mlol