The e-journals catalogue of Padua University: a proposal for a light solution to a heavy problem Lucia Soranzo, Rosaria Candiloro, Lisetta Dainese, Tomaso Scarsi, Antonella Zane Università degli studi di Padova | Centro di Ateneo per le Biblioteche Introduction Padova University, like other ancient universities, such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, is one of the great cultural centres of the Western world, where the concept-construction of the Gymnasium Omnium Disciplinarum, all over the world, was first established and cultivated with features of completeness and continuity. At Padova University, libraries are considered essential services supporting Learning and Research and are officially defined as "educational -scientific-cultural laboratories". Padova University library system serves a population of about 60,000 students and 2300 of teaching staff. The University Library System (SBA) is currently composed of 55 libraries; while 30 external libraries have joined following a participation agreement with the SBA. Since 1988, the automation of the library procedures and activities has been implemented with the result of an OPAC owned by the University Library System. This catalogue is part of the SBN’s on-line archive (National Library Service). Although the holdings of paper format journals are visible on our OPAC, the electronic ones are not. Following the recent and rapid development of e-journals, the need emerged for their rational management and easy access: it became necessary to win the fragmentation and dissemination of this type of resources which were presented as separate lists published in the web pages of the university libraries often as rough lists. As the current library automation system could not be used for the management of e-journals, it was decided to create a new catalogue totally devoted to them with the goal of having a single point of access for their retrieval and management. A Working Group for the E-journal Catalogue was constituted in October 2001 with the purpose of creating a web accessible dynamic database. The choice of the group was towards a product that should prove light, flexible, and strongly user-oriented. The aim was to develop a common user interface catalogue for e-journals that would: give visibility both to the titles subscribed centrally and by single libraries, promote communication to and from its users; handle malfunctioning; integrate the academic electronic resources (via direct links from databases to the catalogue); perform usage statistics; collect economic and administrative data. The first release was produced in February 2002. Technical Features The catalogue search software has been entirely designed with open source programs. The database is made of 8 tables and the db server used is MySQL. The application server Zope has been used in order to search, insert, update and delete data. Usage statistics have been produced by Webalizer application and the in-house development CapereStats. The application runs on IBM x225, operative system Gentoo Linux. The server is located in Padova and hosts also Venice and Ancona Universities data. The update of the database is done by perl scripts from Excel files (when dealing with large amounts of records) or by web front-end from libraries. A friendly user search interface with cross search options has been developed (FIG.1).