Search

The aim of this paper is to offer an overview and some reflections about the first edition of the international master on Conservation of antique photographs and paper heritage, held in Cairo and Catania, managed by Catania University and Helwan University with the collaboration of Italian Embassy in Egypt and Italian-Egyptian Center for the conservation of ancient photographs and paper heritage (Centro italo egiziano per la conservazione delle fotografie antiche e del patrimonio cartaceo – EICAP). Twenty two Egyptian students and a huge number of Italian and Egyptian professors took part at the master during four semesters, giving a contribution in terms of sharing knowledge on conservation issues, especially regarding paper and photographs heritage. The collaboration with internationally renowned librarian institutions was of great value and interest as, for instance, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Il contributo intende offrire un resoconto e alcune riflessioni intorno alla prima edizione del master biennale internazionale Conservation of antique photographs and paper heritage, svoltosi tra Il Cairo e Catania, promosso dall’Università di Catania, dall’Università di Helwan (Il Cairo), dall’Ambasciata italiana in Egitto e dal Centro italo egiziano per la conservazione delle fotografie antiche e del patrimonio cartaceo (EICAP). Il master ha visto la presenza di 22 studenti egiziani e di numerosi docenti, sia italiani sia egiziani, che si sono alternati nei quattro semestri offrendo un contributo di rilievo all’approfondimento in chiave internazionale delle tematiche inerenti la gestione e la conservazione del patrimonio documentario, in modo specifico, di quello cartaceo e fotografico. Di grande valore e interesse la collaborazione, in margine al master, con istituzioni bibliotecarie di rilievo internazionale quali, ad esempio, la Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Negli ultimi anni la crescente disponibilità sul mercato di e-book, tablet ed e-reader a prezzi accessibili ha determinato un aumento dell’offerta (da parte delle biblioteche) e della richiesta (da parte degli utenti) di eBook scaricabili in biblioteca. L’ingresso degli e-book nelle collezioni delle biblioteche ha però fatto emergere una serie di problemi di carattere tecnico, legale e strategico che a loro volta sono causa di preoccupazione, confusione e frustrazione per tutte le parti in causa: biblioteche, utenti, autori ed editori. Per questa ragione l’IFLA ha istituito un gruppo di lavoro con il compito di preparare un documento preliminare sugli e-book in biblioteca, al fine di agevolare la formulazione di politiche più precise sull’argomento.

The paper reconstructs the main lines of the history of AIB studi. Journal of Library and Information Science, an Italian Library Association publication. The previous titles and editorial programs development of the journal are outlined, highlighting how the ‘vocation’ for the establishment of a scientific journal – as well as professional interest – internationally oriented and fully open access has been increasingly defining, with the support of the Italian Library Association (AIB). In particular, critical steps from paper to digital, indexing and open access are discussed, referring to journal management and editorial work, to actual issues and principles involved, and looking at the still possible developments in the direction of open science. The landscape in which AIB studi is placed and progresses is finally completed with some digressions on related topics, such as e-journals management systems, citational databases, and the open access movement.

The paper focuses on the private Pietro Laura Fund, which belongs to the Biblioteca universitaria di Genova’s bibliographic and manuscripts collection since 1938, and presents the critical issues related to the management of this material during the years. This fund should be re-evaluated in its entirety, starting from its peculiar characteristics (notes of owners, annotations, handwritten additions) that make it valuable from the point of view of book collecting and of librarianship. In order to remedy, albeit partially, the absence of specific investigations on the fund, it was decided to proceed with the presentation of the state of the art, suggesting at the same time some points for reflection on the initial donation and on the treatment hypotheses. The fund should be treated following the guidelines produced in 2018 by the AIB Commissione nazionale biblioteche speciali, archivi e biblioteche d’autore.

The problem addressed in the paper lies within the field of social robotics of media and social communication studies. The primary objective is to partially verify the occurrence of the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. It would occur in relation to anthropomorphic robots carrying out selected professions of high social respect. The second objective is to establish the level of a person’s sense of security depending on the type of services performed by the robots. The third purpose is to determine the correlation between various professional activities and anxiety of service recipients. The data was collected by means of a survey conducted on a target group of post-millennials by means of a questionnaire which assessed the images of anthropomorphic robots of varying degrees of similarity to humans who performed professions of high social prestige: university professor, physician, nurse, qualified worker, accountant, salesman. Some of the characteristics of the mentioned professions also feature a modern librarian, herein referred to as a librarian – an erudite of the digital era. The inference was carried out based on the distribution of marks and the Chi-squared independence test. The study indicates a premise that there exists the uncanny valley, and that there exists a relationship between the level of trust and confidence and the type of work the robot performs.

This paper describes the methodology applied by AIB, during the Covid-19 emergency, to provide information and recommendations in support of libraries and librarians. We focus in particular on the AIB recommended solutions to react to two different emergencies, one related to the public health, and the other to the employment in our sector – which weigh on the prospects of our sector. While the first one is of a contingent nature, but requires expensive solutions even in the medium term, the second one is structural.

The purpose of this paper is to present the contents of Satellite meeting IFLA “Transforming LIS education for professionals in a global information world: digital inclusion, social inclusion and lifelong learning”, held in August 30-31, 2019, at Vatican Library and Palazzo Cardinal Cesi in Rome. The authors pay attention to specific topics about LIS education (derived by globalization, widespread of ITC and changes connected with it): the standardization of curricula to improve the occupational mobility; the ethical implications of digitalization of ‘culturally sensitive’ item to promote the communication, the collaboration and the integration between communities; the introduction of LIS educations in university in order to encourage new classes and increase the dialog between institutions.

The analysis of Genoan libraries belonging to the professional associations offers the opportunity to refocus the attention on private specialized libraries. The book collections of the professional associations are made up of often underestimated and/or unexploited bibliographic heritages that, in most cases in Genoa, have gone missing. The paper highlights the critical aspects of a non-professionalized management that is not aware of the value represented by documentary materials of specific orientation that have settled over time. At the same time, the potentialities that such book collections could play in local and national documentary networks are assessed.

Spanish A pesar de que la investigación del usuario constituye un área de estudio consolidada y con unos límites establecidos, su abordaje para aquellos investigadores no familiarizados con ella, entraña dificultades de tipo terminológico. Este tipo de investigaciones se pueden encontrar, al menos, bajo cuatro epígrafes distintos: estudios de usuarios o de necesidades y usos de la información (User studies o Information needs and uses studies), estudios de comportamiento informacional o comportamiento de búsqueda de información (Information behaviour o information-seeking behaviour), estudios de las prácticas de información (Information practices) y estudios de la experiencia de información (Information experience). Este trabajo presenta un análisis de las coordenadas teóricas y metodológicas básicas a partir de las cuales comprender qué hay detrás de estas expresiones, por qué comenzaron a emplearse y qué tipo de investigación se puede encontrar bajo esos cuatro epígrafes. Se pretende facilitar a los profesionales e investigadores interesados en esta materia, la recuperación exhaustiva de la bibliografía especializada así como la lectura crítica atendiendo a esas consideraciones teóricas y metodológicas. English Despite the fact that user research constitutes a consolidated area of study with established limits, it can entail terminological difficulties for researchers who are not familiar with it. This type of research can be found, at least, under four different epigraphs: user studies or Information needs and uses studies, information behaviour or information-seeking behaviour, information practices and information experience. This paper presents a basic analysis of the basic theoretical and methodological features from which to understand what is behind these expressions, why they began to be used and what kind of research can be found under these four epigraphs. The aim is to facilitate the exhaustive retrieval of specialized bibliography, as well as critical reading, taking into account these theoretical and methodological considerations.

Fake news is a hot topic, not only in the professional debate. Among the roles libraries are ready to play there is educating to media literacy, meaning teaching people to think critically when they seek information in the digital space. If it is true that critical thinking is a cross-disciplinary skill, the school – the institution in charge of shaping basic skills – seems to be the ideal place to teach this kind of literacy, along with the other indispensable literacies leading to a self-conscious and active citizenship. The present paper, after a short definition of the key concepts, relates about an experience led during the first year of secondary school, inspired by Carol C. Kuhlthau’s guided inquiry model and by the concept of ‘third space’, adapted to the specific situation. The synergy with the teachers led to many observations and reflections on what it is necessary to do to to train students to think critically.

This paper draws a balance – starting from the detailed analysis of the book edited by Roberto Raieli, Advances in information and progress in knowledge: granularity, interoperability and data integration – of the state of the art and of the practical experience of cultural institutions of different nature and provenance around the use of linked open data (LOD) and of the semantic web, and tries to identify the lines of future development.

The paper deals with the role of libraries and librarians in the fight against fake news, mainly focusing on four issues: 1) the relationship between content selection and content evaluation, which is relevant even in dealing with free on-line content and its discovery tools; 2) the relationship between the librarian’s neutrality and her/his social responsibility in the wake of the growth and the danger of fake news; 3) the two different paradigms represented by ‘neutral’ and ‘active’ or ‘expert’ librarian; 4) the relevance for this discussion of the distinction between different kinds of fake news.

The essay follows a different and parallel analysis that became evident during a previous research on library science criteria and methods for collection development, conducted in order to ascertain the reliability of online catalogues as information sources with reference to authors and works for the scientific monograph assessment. Starting from a reconstruction of the Italian librarianship debate of the second half of the twentieth century around issues of library collection development, developed through the comparison with international literature, the paper examines the different actors’ roles and the changed conditions of bibliographic collections during transition from cultural to librarianship management of Italian libraries’ heritage.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Florentine flood, the paper focuses on the progression of book conservation. Over the last few decades, it changed from being a traditional restoration treatment to an interdisciplinary intervention – that needs solid historical foundation, scientific research and practical skills – aimed at slowing down the deterioration process with respect for the volumes’ historical features, their original structures and their materials. In this evolution, some events such as the St. Gallen Conference (1898) and the salvage of the burned manuscripts of the University Library in Turin (1904) were certainly important steps, but the experiences at the National central library of Florence after the overflowing of the Arno river (1966) played a strategic role.

This paper, starting from not necessarily oppositive categories such as ‘boldness’ and ‘graduality’ and with references to twentieth-century poets (Thomas S. Eliot), historians (Fernand Braudel), bibliographers (Donald McKenzie), sociologists (Niklas Luhmann) and librarians (Shiyali R. Ranganathan), suggests reflections on the intersection of different time structures and dimensions in the life of libraries and cultural institutions.

This paper explores some of the topics dealt with in Giovanni Solimine’s scientific works, starting from the volume Percorsi e luoghi della conoscenza. Dialogando con Giovanni Solimine su biblioteche, lettura e società, edited by Giovanni Di Domenico, Giovanni Paoloni and Alberto Petrucciani (Bibliografica, 2016). The book's contents are analyzed under two different perspectives, both of them aimed at delving into the role of Library science today. Nowadays this discipline not only has the task of designing and identifying the best tools for managing different types of libraries, but also needs to make libraries acknowledged by the whole society.

The paper explores the issue of using Wikimedia platforms as tools for the development of digital information literacy in the library, at school and at university, in light of the upgrades of the last three years. The analysis starts from the space reserved for Wikipedia in the Information literacy manifesto drafted by AIB (Italian Libraries Association) and in the PNSD (National plan for digital school), it continues with a series of references to the two white books promoted by The Wikipedia Library (Wikimedia Foundation) and IFLA and presented on the occasion of the “World Library and Information Conference 2016”, it ends with the report of some good practices conducted in Italian libraries in an educational context. Ultimately, it emerges the opportunity to design actions capable of developing digital citizenship practices in an increasingly complex information ecosystem.

The article provides an introduction on the papers presented at the 18th edition of the “Teca Workshop”, held in Bari on 7 and 8 April 2017, entitled “The future of libraries: new roles in the digital universe”.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Florentine flood, the paper focuses on the progression of book conservation. Over the last few decades, it changed from being a traditional restoration treatment to an interdisciplinary intervention – that needs solid historical foundation, scientific research and practical skills – aimed at slowing down the deterioration process with respect for the volumes’ historical features, their original structures and their materials. In this evolution, some events such as the St. Gallen Conference (1898) and the salvage of the burned manuscripts of the University Library in Turin (1904) were certainly important steps, but the experiences at the National central library of Florence after the overflowing of the Arno river (1966) played a strategic role.

The paper reports the “AIB CILW 2016 Conference” entitled “Revamping information resources: granularity, interoperability and data integration”, organized by the AIB study group on Cataloguing, indexing, linked open data and semantic web, held on October 21, 2016, at the National Central Library, Rome. Choral reflection on the theoretical and practical aspects of the transformation of the management of information resources produced by the adoption of the semantic Web and linked open data, has enabled the audience to appreciate some good practices put in place by the cultural professionals and to focus on some particularly promising prospects, such as the development of new data visualization models and the integration of data produced by GLAM specialists with those produced by the Wikimedia community.

The paper presents results of a research about user-catalogue interactions developed at the library of the Department of musicology and cultural heritage (Cremona) of Pavia University (Italy). The research involved a simple random sampling of 30 users and was based on a multi-method approach, including screen captures, pre- and post-search surveys. Results show that users of the library of the Department of musicology and cultural heritage prefer searches by a ‘Google like’ interface, that they search only known items, and that most used search data are author surname (21,9%), or author name and surname (21,9%), or author surname and a word from title (15,6%). Further users put in less data than they know and quite often (36%) data collected from user by the surveys are different from data collected by the analysis of video recordings. This first research suggests to apply this multi-method approach to new case studies and to extend, if possible, researches to new search interfaces (in particular with regard to FRBR-zed OPACs).

The paper describes the Design thinking for libraries: a toolkit for patron-centered design, a document released in early 2015 and originated from experiences of librarians working side by side in their contexts under the Global libraries program funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The private design company IDEO partnered with the Chicago Public Library in the U.S. and Aarhus Public Libraries in Denmark heading to the creation of a practical guide for librarians and managers including readings, resources, and activities that will help to understand design thinking methods and rethink the library to the users’ changing needs. The Design thinking for libraries toolkit originates from the participatory librarianship movement, giving more and more attention to the library community and its active role in designing the library of the future.

Convergence between archives, libraries and museums has been a critical issue in the recent scientific and professional debate, and it lead to a reconfiguration of the various disciplines related to LAM. The interdisciplinary approach seemed the most appropriate to give new meaning to the relationship between archives, libraries and museums, and the best suited to find a convergence path. The essay analyzes the different kinds of disciplinarity regardless of their domain of application, showing how multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity represent three subsequent levels of cooperation and coordination. Exploring the nature of the relationships between the disciplines of archives, libraries and museums, the paper tries to provide an answer to two key research questions: where are these relationships positioned on the range between multi- and trans-disciplinarity? what are their chances of enhancement towards higher forms of cooperation?

Il contributo fa il punto degli studi sul tema delle biblioteche, degli archivi, dei libri e delle carte definite ‘d’autore’, soffermandosi sia su questioni di natura teorica e disciplinare che su problemi di carattere pratico e gestionale. Che cosa si intende per biblioteca d’autore? Quali sono le questioni biblioteconomiche e bibliografiche legate alle biblioteche e carte d’autore? Qual è rapporto tra documenti librari e documenti archivistici, e quale collaborazione è possibile tra bibliotecario, archivista e studioso specializzato? Perché acquisire ancora oggi fondi privati e d’autore? Quanto influisce il locus di destinazione sulla sorte delle biblioteche d’autore? Queste sono le domande a cui l’articolo cerca di dare una risposta esaustiva e ragionata. The essay examines the existing literature on the topic of writers’ archives and libraries, dwelling upon theoretical issues as well as on management models and practical matters. What do we mean by writers’ libraries? What are the main bibliographic and archival issues regarding writers’ archives and libraries? What’s the relationship between books and documents, libraries and archives, and how can librarians, archivists and scholars work together? Why is it still important to acquire private libraries and archives? How can the place of destination (locus) affect the writers’ libraries fortune? The paper answers to all these questions.

In the early years of the 20thcentury a tragic event broke in the history of Italian libraries: the violent and voluntary death of Giulio Puliti, librarian and director of the University Library of Catania, author of several essays. The main reason of Puliti’s death was a violent argument with Luigi Sturzo, a fellow member of the Commission for the reconstruction of the municipal library of Caltagirone, that was destroyed by a terrible fire in 1901. The paper recalls the main steps of the reconstruction of the library of Caltagirone between 1901 and 1904, analyzing the role of Puliti and Sturzo within the Commission and displaying several unpublished documents related to the events.

The essay examines the existing literature on the topic of writers’ archives and libraries, dwelling upon theoretical issues as well as on management models and practical matters. What do we mean by writers’ libraries? What are the main bibliographic and archival issues regarding writers’ archives and libraries? What’s the relationship between books and documents, libraries and archives, and how can librarians, archivists and scholars work together? Why is it still important to acquire private libraries and archives? How can the place of destination (locus) affect the writers’ libraries fortune? The paper answers to all these questions.

The paper investigates the relationship between Wikipedia and libraries, briefly reviewing the history of Wikipedia and GLAM – galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – projects, and evaluating the possible future development of library-related projects.

‘Save the libraries’: how many times have we heard/read this? But what's exactly worth saving? What justifies – today – the very existence of libraries? French public libraries' answer to this question is: their mission for citizens emancipation and empowerment. The paper analyzes the different definitions and meanings of the word ‘crisis’, then lists which services can be implemented by public libraries in response to the current economic, social and political crisis. Finally, it presents the first results of a survey (still underway) on citizens participation in the libraries of the Rhône-Alpes area. In conclusion, in order to respond to the crisis libraries must increase the access to information for everyone, implement new services to support individuals (for example in job search or professional re-qualification), and – last but not least – foster citizens participation in order to transform the library in a space where people can experiment – better: can contribute in creating – a different society.

The Bibliographic framework initiative – BIBFRAME – is a project initiated by the Library of Congress in order to design an entities/relationships bibliographic description, capable of easing the transition from MARC to linked data and the semantic Web. The paper describes the professional and scientific debate leading to BIBFRAME, the project’s first steps, the structure and classes of the BIBFRAME model, and the other related initiatives.

Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont (1925-2013) is known for her article – Communication Patterns in High-Energy Physics (1965) – focused on the practice and circulation of preprint papers among the physicists’ community. The article was never published by the scientific journal to which it had been submitted, thus remaining a preprint itself – an emblematic rather than significant coincidence. It was almost doomed to oblivion until its online publication in 2002, when it was acknowledged as a groundbreaking study of what, a few decades later, was going to become the highly sophisticated open access scholarly communication system. Cultural and gender studies now help us to better understand this “preprint on preprint” taking into consideration Luisella’s life as a whole (a librarian, a scholar, a wife, a woman), thus revealing her author status: an author claiming for equality. Luisella’s “anthropological” observation of the Physicists’ community from the supposedly subordinate point of view of the library service, discloses once again the eternal dispute between genders and between two cultures.

Prefaced by a general overview of UK higher education, this paper goes on to examine aspects of the changing role of academic libraries and librarians in relation to new technologies, open access and research data management. Specifically, it outlines the challenges of e-learning and academic research and the emerging openness agenda in education, identifying how librarians might contribute. The UK professional library association CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals of the UK) is responding to these challenges through its new Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills (BPKS) framework. As part of the wider field, future roles for our profession – for example the increasing role for librarians in open access and research data management – are briefly explored.

Knowledge transfer between scientific research and industry is especially relevant today, because of the resolute demand for innovation on the part of the European Commission. Libraries and documentation centres – traditionally committed to improving the efficiency of the process of knowledge sharing within the scientific community, with special regard to information access and retrieval – might soon be summoned to support knowledge transfer between research institutions and industry. This is one of the subjects investigated by the IPS – Information Policies in Science – project, briefly described in the paper. With respect to the European Commission’s demand for innovation, Humanities seem to be one of the most critical research fields: for this reason they are one of the privileged areas of investigation of the IPS project.

The paper examines the role of public libraries in promoting knowledge, supporting citizenship and facilitating individual – as well as community – development. Edgar Morin’s concept of “reliance” suggests the ability of contextualizing information, transforming it into knowledge, and establishing a connection between separate knowledge processes. Libraries can borrow several ideas from this concept, proposing themselves as active branches of a new educational system which should provide not only access to information, but also the opportunities and tools that today are essential for a critical reading of the world, life, and society. Public libraries have become tightly entwined with democracy, citizenship and social rights – three major issues of Western Europe’s welfare politics, now on the wane because of the global economic crisis. Therefore, now more than ever, it is important to understand how to revive the democratic and social function of public libraries, and to sustain them as inalienable expressions of local welfare. Eventually, the concept of development is almost boundless, allowing innumerable interpretations. With respect to public libraries it can be related to the idea of cultural and social improvement of the community, but it must also be related to citizens’ well-being, intended as the free expression of their personal capabilities: in this perspective, public libraries can legitimize themselves as spaces and places of actual opportunities.

The article intends to critically discuss the opinions expressed by Steve Coffman in The decline and fall of the library empire, published in the April 2012 issue of the online magazine «Searcher». Coffman's paper examines the numerous attempts libraries have undertaken to assume a role in the digital revolution which has completely changed the information and knowledge environment: web directories, Library 2.0, virtual reference, intermediate searching, Internet public access and ebooks. Coffman concludes that libraries, which were the starters of many ideas now in place to access knowledge on the Web, cannot compete with private companies – richer in resources and organisational skills – in managing and implementing the digital library. Consequently, the author wonders if libraries shouldn't rather bet on their physical assets: collections, buildings and people, as this offer has no comparable service on the market.