FIDES Report 2010/2011

The number of members of FIDES amounts 84 libraries. The 16th General Assembly at the Library of Diocesan Theological Seminary in Koszalin on Sept. 20-23 2010 was an interesting event in the activity of Federation. The meeting included a one day symposium on the history and librarianship. The 17th General Assembly of FIDES will be held on Sept. 12-14 2011 in Cracow. Its programme includes a half day symposium in the new library of the Pontifical University of John Paul II.

FIDES continues the most of its previous activities and projects. It cooperates with the Polish central academic catalogue NUKAT (http://www.nukat.edu.pl) distributing a database with authority files among members and some public libraries using the same software. Three our “traditional” central services are present in the Internet: a website, a multi browser FIDKAR (with 50 searchable catalogues and almost the same amount of bibliographical databases) and a digital library.

The digital library of FIDES (http://digital.fides.org.pl) is growing slowly and regularly.  About 300 new publications have been added during a year and now it comprises 1067 publications. These digital resources are available also via European Digital Library “Europeana”. It is thanks to the Polish PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation to which the FIDES library belongs.

A great new project is now being realized – an online theological bibliographical database (EBNT). It will index articles and essays published since 1980 in about 170 Polish periodicals in theology and religious studies and in Festschriften and congress publications. The agreement was signed among FIDES and the National Library of Poland on October, 25th 2010. FIDES received more than 50,000 records for free from the National Library, and receives the new ones every month. These descriptions are being enriched with some new information, like links to full texts or translation of Polish titles, or abstracts. As the National Library indexes only periodicals, FIDES provides records of articles and essays from other publications and also retrospective indexing for some journal issues. This database has been officially launched on the Internet on April, 2nd 2011 and is freely accessible from the FIDES website. At the moment the total number of records is 65,780.

From June 2011 FIDES has its fanpage on Facebook.