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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]

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]