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The aim of this paper is to present some thoughts on the sidelines of the international conference "The privilege of the written word: management, conservation and enhancement of personal papers and books", held at Salerno University on April 10-12th 2019. The conference represented a significant moment of meeting for the scientific and professional community of archives and libraries in order to debate the issues related to conservation, management and valorization of personal collections. This event also provided an opportunity for the presentation of the 'Guidelines on the treatment of personal funds' edited by the National Commission of special libraries personal archives and libraries of the Italian Library Association (AIB). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An important and not often addressed topic - considering the issues opened by cross-disciplinary projects - is the shared control of authority records, or better authority metadata, extended to other documentary and cultural heritage sciences. This paper will examine the potential opened by multi-dimensional and networked logics in the representation of entities in the form of data towards which the document communities are converging. This approach is even more valid if we consider the users' point of view, presently forced to jump from one information environment to another, and confront different names, forms and attributes for the same entities. The core entities to work on are persons, corporate bodies, places, chronological contexts, events, qualifying their relationships. After a brief resume of archival description's peculiarity, the paper highlights the updated standards available, mostly IFLA-LRM and RiC, precious documents to start from and stimulate an active collaboration. To facilitate the sharing, control, and enrichment of authority data in the form of RDF assertions, librarians and archivists may follow several pathways: matching the existing conceptual models, converging on a shared data playground like Wikidata, and developing foundational meta-ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this study is to explore the role that accounting systems effectively played in managing the internal relationships among the various administrative bodies of the Comune (City State) of Siena in the 14th century. This period was characterized by an ever increasing need to monitor economic activities, a need perceived by the Comune with regard to all those who were entrusted with the management of public funds. In particular, in 1358 an office was created specifically to review the accounts of the camarlenghi (who were in charge of the management of public funds) nominated by the Comune of Siena. The office was originally staffed by three temporary Riveditori (auditors) and later by a permanent commission of Regolatori (regulators). On the basis of archival sources, so abundant on 14th century Siena, this paper analyses the changing relationships among the various administrative bodies of the Comune, in particular detail the Gabella generale and the Biccherna (which were the offices in charge of managing the main cash inflows and outflows pertaining to the administration of the Comune) and the activities of the Regolatori. By interpreting accounting systems as a set of rules (i.e., the formalised statements of procedures), roles (the network of social positions), and routines (the practices habitually in use), the present study shows that, since the Middle Ages, accounting has played a central role in the management of internal interdependencies and in the construction of organisational order. In the case of the Comune in the 14th century, accounting practices were capable of regulating, legitimising and balancing relations of power, dependency and autonomy among the different bodies of the same organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to protection of confidentiality, involving any person mentioned in the documentation, is of great importance. The paper aims to outline the state of the art and to evaluate possible solutions for new improvements. The relationship between the rights of scientific research, the free expression of thought and the right to privacy of personal information are analyzed in legal terms, under Italian legislation, and in technological, just about the use of the technologies of the digital reproduction of documents, with particular attention to the concepts of communication and dissemination of personal data. The paper shows that the existing regulation framework fully meets the needs of protection of privacy, including in relation to technological changes taking place. Finally, it proposes strengthening instruments like the statement of informed consent and the elaboration of specific policies to ensure the highest possible protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notarial archives in the early-modern Alpine region were managed according to an extreme variety of styles. This paper presents the case of a community of the central Italian Alps, set at the north-western borders of the Republic of Venice. Focusing on the local response to a law promulgated by the venetian Senate in 1612, notarial archives and their preservation become, in an "institutional perspective", a political weapon in defending local autonomies against the centripetal force exercised by urban cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BSB's music department (entrusted since 1949 with the management of the national information service on music) is one of the largest music libraries in the world in terms of the size and quality of its collection, but also in terms of the breadth and depth of its collection acquisition policy. The various materials are widely catalogued and indexed in a very articulate way, using a wide range of catalogues and according to specific rules. The BSB currently uses the RDA and MARC21, according to national policies. The Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), the authority files of the German-speaking library world, are used both in cataloguing and in subject classification. The GND is nowadays used even outside the library world by archives, museums and other kinds of institutions, as well as for the cataloguing of websites. The BSB participates in the RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) international online catalogue of music sources, and, together with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, manages its OPAC. The presentation will describe these projects, as well as the cataloguing workflow, the application of the RDA in specific cases, the special rules (and cataloguing system) for personal archives and musical legacies (RNA), and finally the futuristic service 'musiconn'. This last service is included in the national service for music information Fachinformationsdienst Musikwissenschaft and has been developed by the BSB: it offers the possibility to search by melody, as part of a project based on Optical Music Recognition (OMR), a software tool that allows automatic recognition of compositions after they are printed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of social media in people's everyday life has set the basis for big changes in the relationships between individuals, public and private bodies on a global scale. With public administrations willing to adjust their identities to new tools for communication, archival organizations approached to social networks to connect with new users and enhance their heritage. This paper aims to define methods, specificities and limits of the Italian archival institutions' social media policies, opening up to a first comparison with other national strategies, especially with the French one. A special focus has been put on the role of social networks in March and April 2020, when Italian archives faced a two-month lockdown following the health emergency caused by the spread of COVID-19: moved away from the ordinary work, archivists and archival institutes were encouraged to start alternative forms of communication with their users, including a more effective social campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conjectures that standard archival descriptions are no longer efficient in order to answer to society needs, mainly in an intercultural perspective. After a brief evaluation of the peculiarities of cultural heritage different domain languages, the specific issues of archival descriptions are discussed, seeking the possible strategies - technological as well as cultural - valid to open to an integration of descriptive languages. A particular focus is proposed on RDA, an approach which shows to be the best candidate to harmonize the separate descriptions typical of archival domain and activating the potential informative integrations with any limitation of information environments and single content quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most critical problems for research archives is their definition. Without a common dictionary and a robust conceptual framework, academic research heritage, specifically if in digital form, is at risk; the efforts made for its preservation and exploitation will not be able to face old and new challenges and even less to exploit technological potentialities and new languages available. The tools developed for making accessible and preserving the academic outputs generally support creation of digital library and repositories for publications or for individual items. Specialized and efficient tools for identifying, describing, making available and preserving this heritage are requir ed. Compliance with acknowledged standards is necessary, but it is also essential to define consistent workflows, approve adequate policies and build sustainable services. The paper will discuss these issues by presenting the Sapienza Digital Library and its goals of identifying, making accessible and preserving significant research heritage in digital form. The ambition is to make it understandable and reusable both for the scientific community and professionals , and for no-academic users. Digital resources are described by the investigators themselves on the basis of detailed policies and with the support of professionals from the archival and librarian domains. Special attention is devoted to resources contextualization, to the provenance information and to the presentation of research projects and their outcomes. Collections are described and made accessible taking into consideration their specific domain vocabularies and standards and a validation process is in place to ensure a qualified approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article addresses the issues and challenges of special collections management through the case study of Timbuktu manuscript collections. The dual issues of preservation and access are presented in the light of current librarianship trends, highlighting the potential weaknesses of special collections libraries when faced with new missions. Given that inclusion and civil growth are part of Lyon's declaration on libraries, we should check to which extent we are able to comply with these requirements also with respect to special collections. The Malian projects provide a good point of view because of the number of activities that are currently being performed: the main activities and the way the work is organised are described, addressing at the same time the issue of access and scholarly needs. A reflection is developed on the role of special collections in the changing landscape of libraries' activities and missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori e Audiovisivi (ICBSA) has just finished, together with the Università degli Studi di Siena and Università degli Studi di Siena per stranieri, to work on the project "Ti racconto in italiano" which focuses on providing different access points to audio resources collected between 1980's and 2000's by ICBSA itself, as part of its mission to document Italian audio and audiovisual culture. The main aim of the project is to create tools which will enable scholars of social history, art and literature to use these sources as well as providing original material for foreign students to exercise their knowledge of Italian. In order to facilitate access it has been necessary to create finding aids such as indexes and thesauri. For this purpose ICBSA has started a collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze and the latter's Nuovo Soggettario. This is not the first case of a project by insititutes of the Italian Ministry of Culture comprising the use of the Nuovo Soggettario for the indexing of archival materials. Indeed, the Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana has already worked in this direction a few years ago when treating the so-called Straw archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IIIF APIs have been used since 2012 by a community of research, national and state libraries, museums, companies and image repositories committed to providing access to image resources. The IIIF technical groups have developed compelling tools for the display of more than a billion IIIF-compatible images. We can figure out that with hundreds of institutions participating worldwide, the possibilities, for instance, for IIIF-based scholarship are growing so one question could be about the discovery of those images relevant to one's research interests in order to discover them for their consultation or, even more, for their reuse. While IIIF specifications discussion has focused on the machine-to-machine mechanisms of making IIIF resources harvestable, we have yet to implement an end-to-end solution that demonstrates how discovery might be accomplished at scale and across a range of differing standards for metadata arising from libraries, archives, and museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Description is one of the key activities of archival profession, a guarantee for correct management, access and conservation of archives. The cornerstones of the tradition, formalized in the last decade of the twentieth century in the standards of the International Council on Archives, are the respect of fonds and their contexts. The ICA standardization renewal process started in 2012 has produced two versions, both in draft, of the Reference Model of the brand new standard RiC-Records in Contexts, on which the very recent RiC-Ontology has been based. The descriptive hierarchy and the concept of the finding aid - even electronic - as a document isolated from the Linked Open Data available in the infosphere are overcome. This contribution aims to present RiC-CM and RiC-O, their criticalities and perspectives, contextualizing them within the debate and practices of archival description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why define and describe an archive as hybrid? Haven't archives always been hybrid in terms of media, functionality and purpose? And won't they still be such in the future? Some reflections originate from these questions, starting from the definition and meaning of the term hybrid, the validity of principles and methods of the archival tradition in the digital environment, the organization of archives free from predetermined schemes, the role and activity of the archivist, of archival description and of multidimensional representation in an environment defined as hybrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]