Informatica e diritto, XIII Annata, Vol. XIII, 1987, n. 3, pp. 163-171
Enrico Pattaro, Giovanni Sartor
La "Legal Philosophical Library"
The "Legal Philosophical Library"
The "Legal Philosophical Library", a system for bibliographical data base management, is operating at the "Antonio Cicu" Institute of the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna. The overall project, however, aims at creating numerous other data bases. The main data base consists of a series of homogeneous bibliographical forms which may refer to works of different kinds. In order to facilitate the recording and retrieval of data, these forms have been divided into ten different categories (entire work, part of a work, review, curatorship and display. Each type of form may, also, refer to a work published in a book or in a journal). Each individual form which has been marked with an identification code may contain - apart from a notation of the kind of work codified, the author and the title - the name of the publishing house, bibliographical details, a brief description of the contents of the work and other additional information such as the translation of the title and the original language of the work, the sources of the data contained in the form and any special characteristics of the document where the work is published. The system allows the documents to be retrieved through twelve research channels (type of document, subject matter, title, abstract, document containing the work, surname and name of the author, year of the edition, language, journal in which the work is published, publishing house, identifying code) which can be combined by using the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. Information in the bibliographical data base is stored in a main file (whose records each contain one bibliographical form) and three secondary files linked to the main file. Data are fed in only after all the necessary checks have been made in the special working files to verify their accuracy. Apart from the bibliographical data base, the system, which utilizes a Cromemco computer, the corresponding basic Cromix software and appropriate operational packages, also includes a thesaurus, a dictionary and a series of other data bases storing information relating to publishing houses, journals, orders and a mailing list.