In 2011, on the basis of a comparing and evaluating survey concerning digitized catalogues available on the Web, and also as a result of an analysis of digital policies both in European and extra-European countries, the BDI Committee launched a first project relating to the scanning, in image file format, of the historical catalogues of Italian public libraries.

The scanning and indexing of these catalogues were aimed both at making available a great amount of bibliographic information, within short times and at a low price, of all those catalogues not yet inserted in the National Library Service, and also to supply the visualization of the cards, just as they had been originally drawn up, to users and scholars.

The collection gathers various kinds of historical catalogues: printed and card catalogues, author, subject and specialized (manuscripts, graphic arts, cartographic materials, notated music etc.) catalogues.

The catalogues are organized in different ways: they can be arranged following an alphabetical, topographic, systematic or “mixed” order; to each catalogue some information are also added, thus making news concerning its history and development available to users, as well as drawing up criteria, the period covered, the indexing and access procedures.

The most part of the printed catalogues dates back to the eighteenth century; some of them have still been using for a long time, as attested by the handwritten integrations added during the following centuries.
The card catalogues have been set off during the eighteenth century, or at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The catalogues images are organized in groups, identified by headings arranged in alphabetical order, as in the card catalogue boxes (e.g A-ARIS, ARL-BUV), or by a filing order pointing out the systematic hierarchy of subjects (e. g. GEOGRAPHY, EUROPE, ITALY).
For each image the card headings, or the first heading of a page of a printed volume, have always been indexed, in accordance with the project instructions, but in many cases the libraries themselves have created new different access points.

The database can be accessed since 2003; in 2010 both the interface and the possibility of retrieving bibliographic information have been further implemented. Anyway, the sequential scrolling procedure is still today a function of great interest.

Since 2013, the Historical Catalogues database is one of the indexed databases managed by the search engine of Internet Culturale. Thanks to it, it is possible to integrate the search results coming from this catalogue with those belonging to other databases (OPAC SBN, Manus OnLine, EDIT16, Alphabetica).

The Digitised Historical Catalogues website allows search activities in 219 historical catalogues, both printed and card catalogues, belonging to 37 Italian libraries of the Ministry of Culture, to local bodies and cultural institutions as well.