Search

German art historian Aby Moritz Warburg (1866-1929) was the first to introduce a revolution in the traditional criteria for classifying works of art. He challenged the 'organ pipes' conception of the various art genres and advocated its opposite, the 'blending', thus valorising, rather than the canonical division, the melting, the synergies and the mutual contamination. The catalogue-book Beni svelati, by studying the agglomeration that has accumulated over time in the closed rooms of the State, illustrates precisely how this fusion, accidental at the start, resolved itself, as time passed, into something historically meaningful in itself. This is even truer at the present moment, now that the advent of the digital format has decisively affected the traditional division by subject, characterising the culture of the last centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the papermaking inventions that, beginning with the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543), became part of anatomy books. In particular, flaps became the tactile and visual tool that allowed, by progressively lifting individual flaps of paper (lift the flap), to represent the layered arrangement of organs and apparatuses of the human body. These movable devices, along with others (e.g., volvelle) widely employed especially in astronomy texts, became the educational complements of the new science. The paper reconstructs, through some significant samples, the evolution of interactive anatomical books up to the threshold of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book by Lucio Gambetti, An editorial Odyssey: one hundred years after Joyce's Ulysses, little more than a hundred pages, leads us on a journey through the publishing history of one of the most important and influential novels of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. In particular, the book focuses on the Italian edition of the novel, exploring its publishing history, its critical reception, and the linguistic challenges that made it difficult to translate and interpret such a complex work. In the past, the issues related to the question of copyright for the various editions of the novel over the decades has been already addresses, the copyright claims made by the heirs, in particular by the late Stephen James Joyce (who passed away in January 2020), and the double expiration of the author's copyright, first in 1992 and then in 2012. The subsequent battles over the copyright of the unpublished manuscripts, the veto on investigating what the original text of the work was, the censorship biographers were subjected to at the hands of Stephen Joyce, and the editions that disappeared from the market are all issues that the author of this article is familiar with. Throughout the twentieth century, numerous acts of censorship slowed down the availability of translations or revisions in the publishing market in various countries. Therefore, this paper is an essay-review, with some new references missing in Gambetti's book, such as the recovery of a sentence of an Italian Court, which can be found at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissertation can - metaphorically and anthropologically - constitute a 'rite of passage', since it marks the transition from student to graduate status. It is a written work: a sort of essay, planned together with a supervisor, that the undergraduate student produces and discusses at the end of a cycle of University studies. The drafting of the paper is usually fraught with impediments, due - in principle - to the fact that students never before have to face such a task and, therefore, the utmost care is needed so as not to, more or less intentionally, run into the infringement of a third party's intellectual property. By virtue of this, the present contribution has a substantially pragmatic goal, since it intends to offer methodological guidance for the writing process, hoping to help students avoid incurring in plagiarism. The university library, from this point of view, plays a crucial pedagogical function, since it does not merely provide documents, but it contributes to expanding the boundaries of the civic and social, legal and cultural education of undergraduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the evolution of the UNESCO Public Library Manifesto from the first revision in 1972 to the recent version of 2022. The 1972 Manifesto, a hasty update of the 1949 text, marks a clear change in the addressees: no longer local communities, citizens and the library profession, but public authorities and profession-als. There is a strong emphasis on the role of the public library in culture, reading and information; on the right to access for all; on new media. The 1994 Manifesto is the first joint IFLA-UNESCO Manifesto. It stresses an intimate connection between freedom, well-being, the development of society and individuals and a conscious and complete exercise of a full right to access knowledge. The public library is defined as a 'local gateway to knowledge': an effective definition for a non-localistic vision. In the text, however, there is a gap between the formulation of the context scenario and the wealth of content that has emerged since 1990 in the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Program Development, a radical rethinking of the traditional concept of de-velopment. The 2022 Manifesto stemmed from the collaboration between IFLA and UNESCO-Section Infor-mation For All Programme. This article questions the three fundamental thematic nuclei of the new text: - 'sustainable development'. A more explicit reference to the UN 2030 Agenda would have made more transparent the type of orientation (systemic, multidimensional and inter-institutional approach; integrated design and planning; development of feedback knowledge; inter-generational perspective) necessary to face the challenge; - 'libraries in the knowledge society'. There is a very strong connection between knowledge and skills for citizenship, with an emphasis on scientific citizenship and the methods and tools for its effective and daily exercise; - the 'community' is a pervasive leitmotiv. Citizens are not just users, but builders of knowledge; libraries play an essential role in building 'bridging' knowledge and open communities. The IFLA/UNESCO Manifesto 2022 is probably a transition text. In the expression of the key mis-sions for the public library, the Manifesto reveals an underlying tension for the future, contained in the alert attention to the present. It is one of the most significant messages, which could perhaps have been made clearer and more intense with a closer integration between the different missions of the public library and a stronger integration of the rich UNESCO tradition on educational policies, cultural heritage, intercultural dialogue, human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from the shift, in the perspective of librarianship, from the centrality of book and library collections to that of the user, the paper intends to explore the informational potential of semantic indexing for notated music, to be considered as a pervasive tool for the organization of an integrated information retrieval service based not only on musical performance but also on fruition. Through a case study, insights will be offered on the practice of indexing notated music in Anglo-Saxon countries through the projects developed by the Library of Congress (LCSH, LCGFT, and LCMPT). Practical proposals will be offered to streamline the retrieval of music resources in the National Library Service by means of the Nuovo soggettano (the Italian New Subject Heading system). After analyzing the information needs of the users of a music library, the authors will propose a FRBRization for SBN OPAC (the Catalogue of the Italian National Library Service), moving from the categorization of Musical Works according to form/genre, and, by exploiting the 'logical connections' that link works with related subject entities provided by LRM, they will propose that subject headings may function as a flywheel to enable the transformation of the SBN OPAC into library linked data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the rich production and the reflections by the writer Dino Provenzal (1877-1972) on his relationship with reading and on the world of books, on readers' behaviour, on the inadequacy of libraries in Italy between the two wars. The author focuses especially on the many articles by Provenzal published in L'Italia che scrive, the journal by Angelo Fortunato Formiggini, between 1922 and 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers both a synthesis and a reflection on the topics addressed during the conference “Women in 20th century’s publishing: sources and case studies”, promoted by Apice Center and the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Milan. The conference aimed at enhancing a field of study that is still little explored, highlighting the challenges involved in the retrieval and use of sources and in the research methodologies applicable to the reconstruction of biographies and activities of female protagonists in 20th century publishing. The day was divided into two sessions, “Sources of the self” and “A room all for one’s self? Case studies and digitization projects”, both encompassing a rich and intensive program that revisited and delved deeper into the themes of feminization in the publishing industry and the use of publishing as a lens into women’s work, at the same time providing important methodological guidelines to approach sources such as the archives of publishing houses and authors, as well as autobiographies. What characterized the conference was the proposal of a complex and interdisciplinary path across history of gender, history of professions, and history of culture. Such path should present female authors, translators, editors, and publishers who show vibrant and multifaceted profiles, but whose narratives have often been obscured by their male counterparts. At the same time, attention should be given to the historical context, to pivotal moments, in the development of the publishing and cultural system at large, as well as to the treatment of sources, of which, in this circumstance, the complexity and criticality fully emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AngelaVinay (1922-1990) was a leading personality in the history ofItalian libraries ofthe twentieth century. Among the numerous and prestigious positions she held, she was the first female president of the Italian Library Association as well as the director ofthe Central Institute fortheUnion Catalogue (ICCU), where she conceived and promoted the National Library Service (SBN). This dossier collects the papers of the conference “For Angela Vinay’s centenary: civil commitment, construction and modernity of nationwide library services”, held in her honour atthe CentralNational Library of Rome on the 24th ofNovember 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with a topic that results still little discussed and which seems to be central to imagining what trasformations libraries will undergo in the near future. This is the concept of multifunctionality. Starting from the data analysis of the first three Istat Census’s editions, this concept was explored in relation to the characteristics of Italian libraries and thanks to a data driven approach a detailed geography is offered, reflecting variations that occurred between 2020 and 2022. The physiognomy of the libraries’s multifunctionality before and after the Covid-19 pandemic was therefore reconstructed. Thanks to the results of an ongoing survey, it was also possible to combine this study with a mapping of the so-called ‘new multidisciplinary and independent cultural centres’ which are widely spread nationwide and which seem to stand out precisely for their multifunctionality. By comparing different visions and analyses, the intention was to set up a comparative reflection betweenmultifunctional libraries and new cultural centers to discover the characteristics that make them contemporary places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reflects on La biblioteca pubblica e la sua reputazione, Maria Stella Rasetti's last book, published by Editrice bibliografica. The reflection starts from the reputation as object of study of different disciplines (such as communication, marketing, economics, sociology) and analyzes the importance of library reputation, closely associated with identity and image. Rasetti identifies four classes to place Italian public libraries and proposes a model to measure library reputation, adapted from business models, which uses personalized questionnaires for each class. The paper analyzes model validity and contextualizes it in the field of user satisfaction, performance and libraries impact. The hope is that measuring reputation can help public libraries to build a new narrative that overcomes public administration stereotypes of which they are victims, and to equip citizens with useful skills for work, everyday and social life, making them active and conscious protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic made the matter of how to train 21st century readers even more urgent, preparing them to deal with a media scenario of attention economy, disinformation, infodemic and post-truth. This paper analyzes the new challenges that readers have to face, through the lens of some fundamental dichotomous questions for the present and the future of reading: information versus knowledge; slowness versus acceleration; attention versus distraction; boredom versus hyperactivity. What are the cognitive differences between digital reading and reading on paper? What do we risk losing in these conflicts? And what can we do to continue to comprehend what we read?. [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 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]

This paper deals with the analysis of the works and theories by Paul Otlet and Otto Neurath, focusing on their positions on the visual value attributed to images as a worldwide knowledge-democratization means. In detail, the theories properly defined by the authors and also the existing scientific studies in the literature referring to the visual communication conceived as a resource by which disseminate and achieve knowledge on a wide level will be illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the various themes addressed in Storia confidenziale dell'editoria italiana by Gian Arturo Ferrari, published by Marsilio in 2022. The author is one of the main protagonists of Italian publishing industry: he worked for almost fifty years in Mondadori and for other publishers, as well as presided over the Centro per il libro e la lettura. From this privileged observatory, he reconstructs atmospheres and anecdotes and provides a wealth of data and information on the events that have characterized the main Italian publishers' life, extending his reflection to the development of Italian society in general. The work is not (only) an historiographical essay but also a story written by someone who was witness and protagonist of the narrated facts, representing, at the same time, a handbook for those who want to work in this world and learn the publisher's profession: it is a book that was not there until now and that certainly fills a gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper illustrates the results of a survey conducted in the period January-February 2023 involving the users of the Turin Public Libraries, an urban system currently affected by a significant strategic rethinking process. Through the analysis of the answers to questionnaire provided by 3,926 people, it was possible to bring to light the complexity and the multidimensionality of the act of reading and to gather interesting information on three central issues: the process that leads readers to choose the book; the libraries' role in fostering and enriching the reading experience; the complementarity between book and other form of access to narrative world, both outside and within libraries. These cognitive elements can help both to improve the collection development policies and to favor the meeting between readers and collections, also through their integrated and transmedial organization within an enriched physical and virtual bibliographic space, which stimulates and enhances the reading experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conference "Measuring and evaluating libraries: was it worth it? Changes, impacts and narratives from 30 years' common work" looked back at over three decades of applied library research, aiming at reporting about different assessment experiences, and outlining new potential perspectives for the future of library evaluation. This paper provides a summary of the conference, reporting the most significant passages of all the speakers' contributions, and concludes by individuating in the collaborative and co-planning dimension a key to future developments in library evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Italian academic libraries have undertaken third mission activities linked to the enhancement of their heritage: library science scholars have already been studying this kind of initiatives, and today the Italian national agency for the evaluation of universities and research institutes (Anvur) considers such actions as a result of the institutional commitment of a university library. A workshop, organized by the Library System of the University of Ferrara together with the Italian library association during the Stelline congress 2022 (Milan, 11 march), analyzed the case study of the bibliotour Storie di libri e palazzi, set up by the University of Ferrara; the workshop also explored new strategic opportunities for the enhancement of academic libraries' heritage, firstly the inclusion of all audiences, with specific reference to Goal 10 ("Reduce inequalities") of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Furthermore, this perspective embraces potentially the entire corpus of recommendations provided by the Agenda. The paper is intended not only to report the main ideas that emerged during the workshop held in Milan but, starting from them, also to suggest building a network of academic libraries, in order to facilitate the communication of third mission initiatives and their public outreach. Therefore, full adherence to the inclusive dimension and the commitment to sustainable development are two new strategic opportunities for academic library activities related to heritage enhancement. AIB has been supporting both strategies for several years, by means of concrete actions, such as the "Maria A. Abenante" Award, as well as organizational structures, like the Observatory on library and sustainable development (Obiss). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to focus on the importance of investigating the value and weight given to libraries by politicians, decision-makers and administrators within their political and administrative activities. The article proposes a reflection on the value given to libraries by some Italian policymakers and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the presence of libraries within the electoral programs of the Italian local elections (autumn 2021-spring 2022). This study has made it possible to construct a map of the positioning of libraries in the mind of politics. This fact is essential for understanding the context from which librarians and researchers can start to change the perception, often simplistic, of policymakers about libraries, to make them understand the impact that libraries can have on society, and to identify effective and efficient strategic actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes some considerations on the configuration of the disciplinary sector M-STO/08, which, in the Italian juridical-academic lexicon, is described in a concise declaration, published with the Ministerial Decree of 4 October 2000, which briefly delineates its boundaries. Mission 4 "Istruzione e ricerca" of the PNRR (Piano nazionale di ripresa e resilienza) envisages a reform of the degree classes and binds the relevant scientific communities, such as the SISBB (Società italiana di Scienze bibliografiche e biblioteconomiche), to adaptations, which concern both the concrete organizational and procedural dynamics, and, at the same time, the theoretical and methodological implications referred to them, and which therefore affect the profile of the disciplinary field of bibliography and library science. The specific objective proposed is primarily based on the analysis of the contents of the current declaration of the disciplinary sector M-STO/08, on its position in the hierarchy of the academic organization, and on the lines of development of the bibliographic culture, that the «short text» of a declaration may succeed in prefiguring. [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 Post-I_IT (Post_Incunaboli_ITaliani) project is the result of the collaboration between Fondazione Scuola per i beni e le Attività culturali and ICCU (the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and Bibliographic Information). It led to an update of the data stored in two fundamental databases dedicated to early printed books: the National census of sixteenth-century Italian editions (EDIT16) and the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC). The project focused on the identification of the Italian post-incunabula 'erroneously' recorded in one of the most important Fourteenth-Century book depositories, in order to integrate information relating to specific editions and items preserved in libraries all over the world. In addition to emphasizing the terminological issues, this paper intends to analyse some substantial differences relating to the descriptive methodology of the two databases, especially in the light of the recent update which enhanced EDIT16. The information which the project contributed to integrate includes: works of uncertain authorship, controversial attributions of typoghrapher or publisher, uncertain dates and places of publication, the location of previously non-registered specimens and the retrieval and linking of digitized specimens via hyperlink. Like other projects, it was possible to demonstrate that the interaction between databases can stimulate further reflections and considerations regarding the nodal information service of bibliographic repositories, and foster identification surveys beyond national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the nineteenth century in U.S. libraries and research centers there has been a growth in book collections that, in 1944, is calculated as exponential. Growth that undergoes a sharp increase after World War II, noting, at the same time, a high rate of overlap between collections, which reduces the total holdings to about two-thirds of the world's published holdings. Using the technology of the time, based essentially on procedures for microfilming documents, proposals for deduplicating collections and reducing the amount of space occupied on the shelf are being developed from a lot of quarters, while electrical, or electronic, devices are being designed and, at times, realized combining the optical element, microfilms, with information retrieval techniques to achieve information discovery integrated with document retrieval. It was actually a series of devices based on the same operating principles, such as electrical photocells, microfilm and high-speed photography, invented, reinvented and reengineered, from which some prototypes were created, until, completely rethought by another inventor, one went into production and was successfully and commercially used. Some of the figures who gravitated around these devices have either remained in the shadows or have been forgotten: this paper, beyond documenting a pioneering period that was very significant for librarianship and for the developments of future information retrieval systems, aims at representing the importance and the role that these people played. [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]

In the first part the paper illustrates the results of an analysis of the Italian editorial production on LGBTQ+ issues, limited to non-fiction for adults published between 2016 and the first half of 2021. Subsequently, the analysis focuses on the representativeness of these publications within the collections of the library systems located in ten large Italian cities. A comparative study is carried out on various aspects: years of publication, publishers, DDC classes, Conspectus levels, usage data. Moreover, through interviews with librarians a qualitative survey is also conducted, to bring to light additional elements, including the reasons and criteria for the acquisition or the non-acquisition of LGBTQ+ titles. In conclusion, after a comparison with similar studies conducted in other geographical contexts, the author tries to understand whether cognitive biases are among the factors influencing the development of LGBTQ+ collections. Bringing out any bias is fundamental to make librarians more aware and to emphasize the professional ethics and the principles of plurality on which the concept of public library is based. This type of study also allows to obtain detailed information elements to be taken into account in projects aimed at implementing recommendation systems that exploit the potential of Artificial Intelligence and, in particular, of machine learning: it should not be forgotten, in fact, that algorithmic biases reflect real-world biases. temi e analisi [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formal representation of cultural metadata has always been a challenge, considering the heterogeneity of cultural objects and especially when dealing with experts' interpretation over them. This paper presents an overview of the mythLOD dataset production as the Mythologiae digital collection revalorisation into linked open data format. The research aims then to explore Mythologiae data leveraging semantic web potentialities, focusing over the formal representation of experts' analysis when associating visual artworks (and their interpretations) to literary sources. The workflow of the project consisted of data model definition, data cleaning and entity linking, conversion (from tabular data to graph) and testing activity (domain experts review over competency questions and two designed on-purpose data visualizations). The result is the mythLOD platform, which present the dataset and the detailed documentation of the research. Additionally, the platform hosts the two data visualization spaces which have been implemented -- the online catalogue and the storytelling experiment over Aeneid -- as a user-friendly testing unit for the dataset and an additional tool for documenting the project and exploring the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]