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The book collection of the Franciscans in Jerusalem - object of numerous enhancement ventures in recent years - preserves a precious proof of the relationship between Europe and Semitic civilizations. These are ancient editions (16th-18th century) of grammars and lexicons for learning Arabic, Hebrew, Ge'ez and Syriac. These books document both the biblical interests of the friars and their desire for inculturation in the reality of the Holy Land. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine a relationship between these volumes and the birth in the mid-19th century of the Franciscan Printing Press. It was the first printing workshop in Jerusalem to print in Arabic: catechisms and grammars for students of Franciscan schools throughout Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. A beautiful virtual exhibition (due to the Covid-19 pandemic), but available in print and on the web, tells all this. [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 paper reviews challenges and opportunities that the Department of Library and Information Science of St. Petersburg State University of Culture (Russian Federation) faced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Didactic problems were caused by a lack of experience among teachers in organizing undergraduate and graduate digital learning (DL). There were two types of technological problems: a lack of a proper LMS system and a lack of proper computers and software in teachers' and student homes. There wasn't any clear and strict policy of DL but in some way, this has provided flexibility in the organization of the DL process. Besides, the lockdown and the isolation situation were psychologically quite hard to deal with: it caused constant anxiety and the feeling that one is late with everything while working 24/7. To deal with these issues, we developed some new DL strategies, used technologies that were 'in hand': Zoom videoconferencing and Russian social network VKontakte, compensated for the lack of the equipment at home by increasing flexibility of teaching and learning, developed the DL environment that included learning and teaching materials and the digital library. We organized the DL process using didactic strategies such as delivering short interactive lectures via Zoom and then keeping their records. We focused on problem-based and project-based learning online motivating students to work together exploring professional problems through projects and research that needed a deeper knowledge in the field. We also found new ways of assessment and evaluation of students' learning progress with online quizzes and solving cases. To manage anxiety, we strengthened the supervising and mentoring work. With the new challenges and trends of the pandemic, the Department has been preserving its educational traditions that allowed for the improvement of the quality of education. [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]

Starting from the observation of the reaffirmed centrality that Wikipedia and its sister projects assumed during the Coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown, the article presents the Wikiproject Covid-19, in its dual articulation in Wikipedia and Wikidata. In particular, it analyzes the key role of librarians participating in the project, that they assume thanks to their knowledge in the LIS field and in the standardized description of resources through metadata. After a short international review, the paper reports the specific case of the University Library Center of the University of Salerno, where some librarians have actively contributed to the Wikidata Wikiproject Covid-19. Starting from the technical background acquired with participation in initiatives such as Wikicite or international campaigns such as "#1lib1ref" and from previous experiments, through the combined use of various tools and the creation of a rigorous workflow, the librarians have come to process and integrate thousands of data from Wikidata into quality biomedical databases in a relatively short time. The workflow focused mainly on three activities: the insertion of external unique identifiers for authors and scientific journals, the qualification of the items through the addition of bibliographic references and the subject cataloguing of the scientific articles relating to SARSCoV-2 and the related world pandemic. Lastly the essay highlights the limits and the critical issues of the semantic web, of the open collaborative projects and of the specific method used, with some considerations on the librarian's new centrality in the context of open data and on the need to participate in these projects in the in the area of Digital Humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]