Abstract

Cultural and creative industries have a central role for sustainable development and great potentialities in the Italian context. This work focuses on Italian public national libraries. They are an interesting case study, as they own cultural heritage and play several functions from cataloguing to conserving book collections and supplying services to a diversified group of users. Using non-parametric techniques of benchmarking, this paper shows that the performance of the Italian public national libraries could improve, with benefits for the whole sector.