Safari Books Online now offers the ITIL v3 lifecycle suite, plus the introductory guide and a couple of other ITIL publications. They have an ITIL portal for the books.

I've heard about Safari Books Online from a few years ago, when our systems administration team looked at their collection of technical guides such as the Perl cookbook. That said, we don't have a subscription.

At Wake Forest University, we are working on a "Best Practices Reference Library" room in our Information Systems building. This room will be used both for meetings about process improvement and for reference; we have a collection of books including ITIL v3, the PMBOK, and others.

We just started cataloging our books! Check out our Library Thing catalog.

Before I learned about ITIL, I was a system administrator trying to figure out how we could "do things differently." It seemed like we were doing the same work that a bunch of IT shops were doing, and maybe there was something already written that we could learn from.

One of the books I found was The Practice of System and Network Administration, by Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan. (Since then, a second version of this book has come out.) It's an extremely thorough introduction to the "soft topics" of systems administration (and it gets points for being written in LaTeX).

OK; our "ITSM Book" is starting to take shape. Thanks to Shawn, our student worker, we now have a Drupal website set up to help Universities talk with one another about IT Best Practices! If you're interested, you can see the (beginnings of) content that we've already got up! So far we've created...