The National Centre collects, catalogues and spreads documentation concerning children and adolescents.

The Centre selects and catalogues paper and electronic documentation of several types: bibliographic materials, rules and regulations, statistics, films, projects.

The documentation is published through specific catalogues and databases:

• Single catalogue [1]
• Databases concerning Law no. 285/97 [2] (first and second three-year periods)
• Database of the projects of Beneficiary Cities [3]
• Data base on foster care [4]

In order to support the analysis, research and monitoring activities and to facilitate access to documents, other services have been created in the framework of the documentation activity:

• a basic and specialist reference service [5]
• elaboration of bibliographic searches [6], always updated, and thematic reviews
• a loan and copy delivery service [7]
• remote access to electronic journals [8](for authorized users)

The basic reference, access and loan services are run by the Biblioteca Innocenti Library "Alfredo Carlo Moro" [9], which was created in 2001 following a collaboration project between the Istituto degli Innocenti of Florence [10] and the UNICEF Office of Research [11].