The ICCROM Library, established in 1959 with a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation, contains the world's most extensive collection of resources, in a wide variety of languages, on every aspect of heritage conservation. It offers support to ICCROM staff, governmental agencies, and conservation students and professionals both in Rome and throughout the world.

The Library is located in ICCROM's headquarters in Via di San Michele 13, Rome and is open to anyone interested in heritage conservation from:
Monday to Friday 10:00 – 17:00

ICCROM Library Catalogue

There are currently more than 100,000 entries in the catalogue. The main subject areas are: conservation and preservation of historic buildings, towns, landscapes and archaeological sites; movable heritage of all kinds and library or archival materials; history and philosophy of conservation; technology of materials; analytical techniques; museology; training; legislation. The catalogue can be consulted online at http://biblio.iccrom.org and also via the Bibliographic Conservation Information Network (BCIN). Many of the references include an abstract in English and all can be searched via keywords. The Library collection includes:

• books and monographs
• periodicals (over 1,800 current titles)
• conference proceedings
• general reference works
• legislative texts and international recommendations
• offprints
• published and unpublished reports
• audiovisual materials

For further details of services and other libraries specializing in conservation literature, click on library services and other conservation libraries respectively.

ICCROM Library
Via di San Michele 13
I-00153 Rome RM, ITALY
tel: (0039) 06 58 55 33 67/06-58 55 33 66
fax: (0039) 0 658 55 33 49
website: http://biblio.iccrom.org
e-mail: library (at) iccrom . org

Koha Project

The ICCROM Library, over the years 2008 – 2011, carried out a successful conversion project from its legacy CDS-ISIS library system to the new Koha ILS (Integrated Library System) using the MARC 21 bibliographic standard.

Koha is an open source program originally created in New Zealand in 2000, and improved over the years by a world-wide user community. The program itself is available free of charge on the web.  Much more can be learned about Koha on the web from the LibLime Koha website or from the Koha Community website.

The Koha ILS is extremely powerful and useful, and also available in many languages, including some that use non-Latin character sets. 

The phases of our conversion project were as follows: 

1. Feasibility study and market survey;
2. Data mapping and conversion out of the legacy system;
3. Set up and customization of the Koha ILS (both staff and public access modules) and loading the converted data into the new system;
4. Staff training, formulating workflows, final customization and project evaluation.

To take on such a project, an institution must necessarily have access to a work group of programmers skilled in Koha.  These could be on-staff programmers, or an institution could outsource the work to a paid support company.  This was ICCROM’s choice, as with our reduced staff we do not have the necessary expertise in-house.

ICCROM’s selected work group, PTFS-Europe, is based in London, UK.  There are many other companies and work groups specializing in Koha.  A list (constantly updated) is available at this link:  http://koha-community.org/support/paid-support/country/

Our migration project and the implementation of the new system required the allocation of substantial resources in time and concentration along with a certain financial investment.  Because Koha is an open source program, there are no licensing fees, which makes for enormous savings.  ICCROM only had to cover the contract costs with PTFS-Europe, which were much lower than if we had selected one of the proprietary library catalogue software options on the market. We currently have a service contract with PTFS-Europe, but those costs are very manageable.

Any institution evaluating an implementation project towards the Koha ILS must verify they have the financial resources and/or competent staff time available, so as to ensure successful completion of the project.

updated on: 5 November, 2012