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The paper reflects in the margin of Giovanni Solimine's book L'Italia che legge, published by Laterza in 2010. The paper underlines Solimine's intellectual versatility, one of the first and few Italian LIS scholars who devoted some attention, during his long career, to the fields of reading, publishing, cultural consumption and cultural industry. One of the great merits of the author is the ability to use statistical data without forgetting that reading question and its development is first a cultural question, overcoming data peremptory nature and revealing details that go beyond purely numerical relief. Solimine's book is the result of a desire to see things from different angles, to avoid theorems or mystical impulses, not to resign himself to the simplest or most fashionable explanation. Reading data analyzed with hindsight give the impression of a substantial immobility and, thanks to Solimine's depth of research and vision, on numerous passages the book seems to foresee trends and problems that will strongly emerge in Italy in the following years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 13rd October 2016 the Chiostergi-Tuscher archive and library, originating from the heirs' house located in France (Saint-Cergues Les Voirons), was transferred to the Centro cooperativo mazziniano "Pensiero e Azione" in Senigallia. The paper reports about how this remarkable heritage of Chiostergi-Tuscher was retrieved and returned to Italy after thirty years. The collection includes correspondences, letters, diaries, documents, journals and papers, pictures, books, posters and other archival and bibliographic materials of great historical value to learn about the political, civic and cultural activities of Giuseppe Chiostergi (1899-1961), anti-fascist, member of the Italian Constituent Assembly and of Parliament, ambassador, pro-European and statesman, friend and correspondent to leading Italian and European personalities in the 20th century. [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 paper aims to provide an overview of the 61. National congress of the Italian library association "Librarians, the most beautiful job in the world. Also in Italy?" (online, November 25-26, 2021). Numerous speakers from the professional sphere and the university context participated in the congress, many of whom belong to AIB commissions and observers. The most significant issues that emerged from the speeches were reported, but we are aware of the impossibility of returning their rich content. In the conclusions, a reflection is proposed on the need to address the critical issues of the profession and libraries through different perspectives, overcoming self-referentiality and thus reaching a rich and profound knowledge of our sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reproduces Giovanni Solimine's last academic lecture, held in streaming on May 28, 2021. The lecture develops around main themes on which the author focused in his long academic career: the library, the function of books and reading, the skills in the knowledge society, the way in which culture develops and circulates on the web. Solimine has dedicated many publications to these issues, including his last four books published by Laterza between 2004 and 2020 (La biblioteca: scenari, culture, pratiche di servizio; L'Italia che legge; Senza sapere: il costo dell'ignoranza in Italia; La cultura orizzontale). In his lecture, the author takes up and updates the main reflections contained in his volumes which, according to him, seem to belong to a unique design that has taken shape over time, just like a journey where each new stage finds its origin in the conclusions of the previous stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces some professional choices that guided the management of Italian libraries over the last fifty years, focusing on the interpretation of their cultural role, also in relation to the progressive spreading of digital culture. Libraries, regardless of their functional typology, remain a constitutive part of Italy’s cultural heritage: it is therefore essential to find a synthesis between their nature of ‘cultural heritage’, their information function and their social function. In light of this common ground, it is therefore important to find a synthesis between libraries’ informative and social function. Today, libraries are in the most favorable position to weave relationships between people and institutions. Librarians can identify in this current context fertile ground to redefine their profession and place themselves at the service of an Italian civil and cultural revitalization. It is a question of giving libraries – intended as places of inclusiveness and gathering – a greater baggage of knowledge and culture to perform their widely recognized social role. By expanding their range of action, libraries remain social, cultural and information hubs capable of carrying out a renewed connective and participatory function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with two closely related issues: the legal deposit of cartographic materials in Italy and their census by the Bollettino delle pubblicazioni italiane ricevute per diritto di stampa (1886-1957) and the Bibliografia nazionale italiana (BNI, 1958). Although cartographic materials represent a heritage of extraordinary historical, artistic and cultural value, they have long been neglected by legal deposit regulations, and their census by the Bollettino and Bibliografia nazionale italiana was irregular for a long time, until it was completely abandoned in the 1960s. Moreover, only maps and atlases were required to be deposited and surveyed, while other types of cartographic resources such as globes, three-dimensional models and digital maps were never taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes some considerations related to the contents of Chiara Faggiolani’s book Come un ministro per la cultura: Giulio Einaudi e le biblioteche nel sistema del libro (2020), dedicated to Giulio Einaudi’s intellectual and editorial personality, and focusing on the relationship between the ‘Dogliani project’ and the different environments of the Italian ‘book system’ of the early 1960s. The project, accomplished with the inauguration of the Luigi Einaudi Library in 1963, highlights the attempt to organically integrate architectural space, library collections and service management. What triggered this integration was Giulio Einaudi’s vision, shaped by his father’s passion for books and by the charisma and extraordinary intelligence of the members of the group called the ‘einaudiani’, who were the protagonists of the cultural season of a country, Italy, that was struggling to come to terms with massive cultural, economic, political and social transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the available data on the book market and on reading behaviors in Italy during 2020, also taking into account the international landscape and relevant figures on other cultural consumptions, with the aim of proposing some interpretative hypotheses and analyzing the main trends. As often happened in the past, once again the real data have disproved some forecasts. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been different in different stages of the emergency. In the first weeks of lockdown, despite the increase of free time at home, the propensity to read does not seem to have grown significantly, while the sales figures, due to the bookstores' closures, led to fears of a collapse in consumption. Things went differently during the second wave, with a strong recovery of the book market: the year even closed with an increase in sales value compared to 2019. However, the radical transformations that are taking place in the relative weight of different sales channels are worrying, with a significant shift from 'physical' bookstores towards e-commerce, where Amazon holds a share of over 80%. Among the policies implemented in recent years to support demand and to promote reading, the '18-yearold bonus' proved to be highly effective: between 2016 and 2019 it allowed a large share of the young people who had moved away from reading in the previous years, to return among the ranks of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many professionals who work in the library field agree that nowadays the Italian library system is experiencing a state of discomfort. There's a lack of resources essential to manage the everyday activities - and perhaps if there were plentiful resources libraries wouldn't really know how to use them, in order to improve their services. Assuming that cooperation is the right solution for enhancing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of library services, a path was conceived to overcome this situation. The project was structured in three steps: first there was a consultation with the researchers who - in 2001 - published the study Le professionalità operanti nel settore dei Servizi culturali: le Biblioteche lombarde (“Professionals operating in cultural services: the libraries of Lombardia"), then international benchmarking was carried out, and finally some library specialists were interviewed. The project pointed out the opportunity of creating a new system that may serve as well library networks as single libraries. This paper presents the first part of the research, i.e. a summary of the activities carried out by libraries and library networks, and the project to achieve their further integration in a “network of networks", exploring also unconventional resources as time banking. The five library areas that were identified as the more suitable for this integration are: digital services, funding, planning of cultural events/activities, monitoring, evaluation and development, editorial support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the main characteristics of the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) method for identifying serials, and illustrates the institutional distinctive features, aim and objectives of the ISSN system. Some operational aspects of the ISSN international Network are briefly pointed out: how the ISSN is used in barcodes for the commercial distribution of the publications, how it is employed as a unique bibliographic identifier in national and international databases and repositories, what's the procedure for the code assignation and for the cataloguing of serials, which are the data search functionalities in ISSN archive and its potential bibliographic uses. The article also describes the role and activities of the ISSN Italian Centre, that is an institutional member of the ISSN Network as well as a national interlocutor for publishing and scientific users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the institutional background of Italian State university libraries, from the establishment of the Italian Ministry of Culture to the present day - going through the last decade of the 20th century, when Legislative Decree 112/1998 proposed a new institutional organization of the State university libraries within the Universities. The main institutional and service tasks that State university libraries have to fulfill are supporting learning and research, preserving national heritage and providing proper spaces for public reading. The paper analyses the opportunities of interaction and cooperation with Universities and University libraries, as for-for instance-the purchasing policies (especially with regard to electronic resources) and the users' training and information sessions. Given the increasing compression of human and financial resources that hampers the daily management of libraries, inter-institutional cooperation nowadays is more desirable than ever. If on the one hand the plurality of tasks and functions of the State university libraries reinforces their vitality, on the other hand it adds an extra burden on the daily organisation and service management, because of the difficulty of arranging their human and financial resources and of giving the right space and visibility to their several institutional and service tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]