National Central Library of Florence

Although the legal deposit of digital born resources is not yet mandatory in Italy, since 2010 the National Central Library of Florence has been providing a long-term preservation and access service for digital publications of national cultural interest, which also includes web archiving.
Following the request of content providers - especially universities and scientific publishers -, BNCF assigns URN:NBNs to the "deposit copy" of acquired digital resources – until now journal articles (accessible from the library's online catalog) and Phd Thesis. The association of the NBNs with a digital preservation system, maintained by a national public institution, makes the NBNs a "truly" persistent identifier (different but complementary to other identifiers such as DOI, handle etc.). To date, approximately 300,000 NBNs have been assigned using different methods. The Library is therefore currently engaged in a major reengineering of the NBN service, which also involves the implementation of a single registry of institutions that deposit digital resources and the reconciliation of legacy databases.