JLIS.it

Reproductions of State Cultural Property: the new Ministerial Decree 108/2024

Paolo Liverani — 2024-04-13

After a year, the Italian Ministry of Culture has revised the ministerial decree regulating the granting of images of state cultural property. The first decree had been criticised by the entire cultural world for the costs it imposed on publications, including scientific ones. The new decree has improved this aspect by granting broad exemptions, but it has maintained an overly complex system and the 'concession' regime, with a prior 'ethical' control on the use of the images, which is neither acceptable nor practically feasible.

"Hence that sense of new air". Archival debate and historiographical developments in Italy between the early and late 20th century

Raffaele Pittella — 2024-05-15

In the second half of the twentieth century it became generally accepted that the goal of the archivist's work should be not only to reconstruct the history of the object’s producer, but also to question its genesis, preservation and the use of documentary nuclei over time. The result was a revisiting of the principles of historical method, thanks in part to the fruitful debate that was established between the community of archivists and that of historians.

GIS technology as a geographical method in applied library research: interpreting emerging issues through an interdisciplinary perspective

Camilla Quaglieri — 2024-05-15

Thanks to current national investigations, research applied to libraries in Italy has an unprecedented amount of data from which are emerging new complex issues and some worrying contradictions. In this framework lies the need to design structured in-depth investigations using innovative interpretative tools. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the article therefore proposes a methodological reflection on the opportunities offered by the integration between geographical knowledge and librarianship. Starting from the comparison between the main application purposes of GIS technology (Geographic Information System) adopted so far, both nationally and internationally, with some new experiments conducted in recent years, the contribution intends to present the potential of a method geographical gis-based for the interpretation of the relationships that link libraries to their context of action.

Teaching cataloguing after RDA 3R project

Konstantinos Kyprianos — 2024-05-15

This paper describes how RDA 3R was incorporated into a two-semester cataloguing course syllabus for first-year students and investigates students’ perceptions and feelings about the courses taught. The information gathered will guide the further development and improvement of the course to fully meet the needs of students and the requirements of the market, especially with the emergence of new resource description standards. Following the course teacher’s approval, the researchers distributed questionnaires during class hours. This method ensured that all students participated. The questionnaire was completely anonymous. It included two demographic questions and the CEQ 23 instrument with a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Besides that, a self-assessment questionnaire was employed to better understand their confidence in the knowledge gained. Quantitative analysis was carried out on the data related to 63 individual students. The quantitative analysis employed the statistical package SPSS. The findings revealed that students are reasonably confident in their new skills but prefer more practice over theory. Finally, they mentioned that they would like more precise goals and an extension of the courses to three semesters, as the workload is quite heavy. Overall, students feel relatively confident about the knowledge gained and believe they can catalogue in a library setting. The CEQ 23 instrument can be used in various knowledge organisation courses. It can provide a better understanding, with the ultimate goal of changing the curriculum or repurposing information organisation courses, allowing any Library and Information Science (LIS) school to judge the future of studies and their direction.

The Season of Living Archives: a Generative Provenance

Federico Valacchi — 2024-05-15

The contribution, starting from consolidated archival concepts, introduces the theme of living archives by evaluating their potential political role and the impact they can have on cultural and social dynamics. It also evaluates what the tools for contextualized use of these resources could be, also in light of a cross-action of the principles of provenance and relevance.

The Nightingale of Keats. Documents, archives, and information objects

Camilla Domenella — 2024-05-15

The paper first analyzes the complexity of the notion of the archival document, in its fundamental definition and its updates prompted by the shift to the digital dimension. It then sets out to consider – from a digital hermeneutic point of view – the notion of ‘document’ from the perspective of the information object and therefore of the intentional object. Finally, the paper discusses the ways in which the archive is a technological enhancement for the interrogability and ‘consultability’ of knowledge.

The Formation of the Idea of the Library as an Institution in 18th-Century Europe. A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach

Carlo Bianchini — 2024-05-15

The paper illustrates the LIBMOVIT project - - Libraries on the Move: Scholars, Books, Ideas Traveling in Italy in the 18th Century - whose main research focus is the European Eighteenth century socio-cultural framework in which the library as an institution acquired an historical, social, public and dynamic dimension. This context will be analysed through a study of the Eighteenth century sources connected to the learned journey experience of the Grand Tour, in particular those contained in the Angiolo Tursi collection - one of the largest travel literature collections in Italy - held at the Marciana national library in Venice. The paper presents the planned approach of the research: first, a classification and an organization of a corpus of relevant documents for the knowledge of travel literature in connection to the libraries world will be created; in particular, the sources will be identified, further bibliographical information will be added, and new sources will be integrated to the corpus and selected documents will be digitized. After that, the research will proceed through a double analysis – traditional and computational – of the texts collected in the corpus is to be developed. First, all the library and bibliographical aspects described by travellers will be studied according to the traditional approach in humanities research to collect important information about the history of libraries (location, decoration, catalogues, opening hours, access, collections, cited books and documents), the travellers and their companions (professions, nationality, reason to travel), the people met (scholars, librarians, superintendents) and the subjects and ideas discussed during the visits in the libraries. Second, the texts will be computationally analysed through several Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, starting from the automatic text recognition until arriving to more complex lexical and terminological analysis and Named Entity Recognition (NER). This work is meant to support the previously described qualitative study and will also allow to produce Linked open data about the domain entities (e.g. libraries, people, books) in view of their publication in the semantic web in order to ease and promote their exploration, visualisation and reuse.

Beyond transformative agreements. Library strategies towards Open Science

Maria Cassella — 2024-05-15

Transformative agreements are increasingly supporting the amount of open access articles, but they also pose big dilemmas to libraries, as costs are also increasing and they have a time limit.

This is the rationale for libraries to imagine new strategies that go beyond the transformative agreements, i.e. the support to the Diamond Open Access, the development of new tools for a national repository network, the commitment to policies that foster innovative practices in the research assessment and so on.

The author argues that collaboration among libraries, funders and publishers is the key to move forward with the open access achievements. Assuming that there will always be costs involved in supporting the Gold Road, libraries, publishers, and research funders will need to conceive in the future new sustainable agreements, both economically and ethically.

Towards a semi-automatic classifier of malware through tweets for early warning threat detection

Claudia Lanza — 2024-05-15

This paper presents a method for developing a malware ontology structure by detecting malware instances on Twitter. The ontology represents a semi-automatic classifier fed by the data extracted from tweets. In particular, the automatic part of the presented methodology relies on a pattern-based approach to detect trigger expressions leading to new information about malware, whilst the manual one covers the evaluation of the results by domain-experts, who also validate the reliability of the semantic relationships within the ontology framework. We present preliminary results on the application of our methodology to tweets extracted from MalwareBazaar database showing how the documents’ collection analysis, through Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, can support the knowledge retrieval and documents’ classification procedures for building early warning system of detected malware. Results obtained from this research paper within the time framework of 2023 are referred to the previous version of the current social network X.

The evolution of Data.bnf.fr: past, present and future of the BnF linked open data project

Elisa Grimaldi — 2024-05-15

In 2011, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) launched the Data.bnf research and development project to meet 3 main goals: to bring together in a single portal the data produced with different formats of the catalogue and the various applications of the BNF, to increase its visibility and promote its reuse by applying the technologies of the semantic web and to experiment a new way of structuring information based on IFLA's conceptual models, thus foreshadowing the catalogue of the future. The contribution aims to trace the innovations that are partially appreciable and partially in the process of being implemented by Data.bnf, which, while remaining stable in its primary goals, has continued to evolve to improve accessibility and functions and adapt to the needs of users.