Back in 1785,[2] Bishop Juan Ramos de Lora [es], a Franciscan clergyman from Seville, opened a Catholic seminary in Mérida, a remote village in the Andes mountains of what is now Venezuela, under Spanish rule[3] by then.
Regarding the seminary, just a few years after it was founded, local authorities started lobbying to seek the grant of the Spanish government to establish it as a university.
It was swiftly approved on March 6, 1980 and the resulting body was simply named University of Los Andes Library Services (SERBIULA).
The automation of library services in the University began with the creation of the aforementioned BIECI library—currently renamed BIACI, but more specifically with the launch of its ICT department (simply known as Informática).
The broad purpose of this department was and still is to imprint ever more efficient, functional, and modern Information retrieval processes to the library services.
These projects definitively ignited and set the pace for the continuous ICT updating and upgrading trend for the SERBIULA library services.
LIBRUM[11] is a locally developed GNU/GPL OPAC management software that handles cataloguing, item circulation, acquisitions, statistics, user administration, thesaurus and full-text e-publication; most notably under the OAI-PMH protocol.
This initiative pertains to the online open access of the scientific production of the institution (the ULA for this particular case), thus giving Biblioteca Digital a new job cut up for itself.
Still under process, the other ULA e-services and projects managed by Biblioteca Digital-SERBIULA are: Nationwide recognition presented itself in 2007 under the National Book Award, for the Library Service category.