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The paper traces the history, including legislation, of the libraries of the State archives, born, often thanks to the will and tenacity of the directors who, through a capillary correspondence network with the cultural institutions of the national territory, fleshed out the newly erected libraries with volumes as a gift or obtained through exchanges of book doubles. The purchase on the antiquarian market and from private citizens of single volumes but also of entire book collections, important for reconstructing the history - including literary history - of the territory of competence, makes these libraries unique in their kind. Established for the updating of archivist officials and to allow them to study, reorganize and inventory documentary collections, over time they have changed their mission by expanding the audience of consultation to external users but only if they are unable to find publications in other libraries. To date, despite boasting a library heritage of a certain importance and often unique, they are managed in the absence of personnel in the role of librarian with all the problems that this entails in terms of cataloguing, planning of purchases and assistance for bibliographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digitization project Giving a new voice to sources. Communicate humanistic research for all aims to make available to the scientific community the audio archive of the Bruno Kessler Foundation's Library, which preserves the recordings of the conference activities of the two humanistic research centers of the Foundation. The project represents, at least in Italy, one of the first attempts to realize a virtual space devoted to audio archival sources researchable freely online to avoid the deterioration of a cultural heritage of extremely scientific relevance, leading to its conservation and availability. The deterioration of the analogue media of the archival collection makes the digitization a matter of survival which allows a diffusion otherwise unthinkable. The accessibility to the audio archival sources allows for enlarging the number of scholars and students that can benefit from the collection for the research. It also allows general users to approach the cultural contents of the humanities. The paper aims to describe the goals, the phases of realization of the project, the methodological problems due to the critical issues of the material supports, the descriptive analysis of the contents, and the opening of the database. The first part of the essay describes the history of the audio archive of the library. This archive covers an extensive period from 1974 to the new Millennium and is composed of the reels and compact audio cassette. The second part analyses the phases of work of the project, from the preliminary analysis of the support to the conversion and the digital reworking. The last part is dedicated to the method adopted in the compilation of metadata of the files and to the description of the structure of the database, as well as his research functions and the descriptive scheme of each audio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Singapore Pavilion, set up as part of the 59th edition of the Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, hosts the work of artist Shubigi Rao, a threefold multidisciplinary installation comprising a book, a video and a paper maze built around the theme of books destruction. They are part of a decade-long project under the title Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. Starting in 2014, it has brought the artist to visit archives and libraries all around the world and to meet women and men who daily dedicate themselves to defending books and cultures on the margins. Here we present the works exhibited in Venice (2022) and the three books that have already been published (2016, 2018, 2022) out of the five scheduled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a synthesis and a reflection on the topics addressed during the conference "The other side of publishing: the women of books and reading in the 20th century", organized by the Apice Center, with the collaboration of the Department of Historical studies of the University of Milan and the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation. On this occasion it was intended to shed light on the women's role in the publishing during the 20th century, especially on those figures who, often without leaving any apparent trace, as editors, illustrators, translators and librarians, played a far from secondary role in discovering authors, in promoting works, in curating collections and disseminating good practices, such as reading. The conference days, organized in five sessions, were divided by themes: "Editorial work"; "In the workshop of translators"; "Promoting reading"; "Drawing the book", and "Female militancy". The event was characterized by the heterogeneity and the multidisciplinary approach of the young researchers involved, who were able to let communicate different skills, related to gender studies, literary, artistic and historical, preferring, from the point of view of the method, the exploitation of archive sources, the identification of new types of documents and the experimentation of new working tools, like digital databases. This strategy led to the articulation of an intense program, full of insights and discussion, branched out from the main topics identified, such as the importance of memory, the autobiographical writings, the ongoing transformation of editorial work and the ability of women to create strong institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]