National Library of St Mark

This paper examines the profound transformation of library collections in the digital era and the pivotal role of legal deposit. In Italy, the incomplete legal framework for digital resource deposit has resulted in the loss of two decades of cultural production. Legal deposit remains the primary mechanism for building a national cultural heritage collection, a concept widely embraced. International cooperation models are examined, such as the UK’s collaborative system, which mitigated the impact of a severe cyberattack on the British Library in 2023. The study underscores the need for robust cybersecurity and considers decentralized storage solutions like private IPFS networks. New AI-driven tools for cataloguing and metadata creation, such as Annif, and innovative access methods are analyzed. Italian law now permits Text and Data Mining (TDM) on legal deposit collections for scientific research. A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model is proposed for computational access, ensuring transparency by linking results to source documents. The paper advocates for a new cooperative governance model, potentially supported by a publicly owned in-house company, to deliver advanced and sustained technological services to legal deposit institutions, ensuring effective management of digital legal deposit systems and aligning with libraries’ evolving roles in cultural and social ecosystems.

L’anconetano Luigi Paolucci (1849–1935) incarna un modello di studioso e naturalista reso possibile dalla stagione intellettuale che caratterizzò l’Italia del secondo Ottocento. Raccogliere e catalogare in un museo a carattere regionale la natura e i suoi “reperti”, collocati questi secondo il loro esatto stadio tassonomico, rappresentò per il Paolucci la volontà di dare concreta sostanza ad un Paese che, sconosciuto anzitutto a sé stesso, doveva cominciare a rappresentarsi come Uno. I giardini d’Italia, opera datata al 1904 ma mai sinora pubblicata, è un lungo excursus che, prendendo eloquentemente le mosse dai giardini romani, s’allunga sino a raggiungere le soglie del XX secolo, dove il “sogno del microcosmo” (per usare una formula di Pierre Grimal), nelle mani dei giardinieri, è divenuto il delirio del macrocosmo, in cui si sono perdute le origini e dove il naturale si confonde con l’ibrido: è esattamente da questo disordine, da questa “confusione”, che il Paolucci muove. Ricollocare nelle loro famiglie naturali le piante da giardino e da parco che ornano il suolo italico equivale per il naturalista non solo ad un dovere morale, come fu per Linneo (suo dichiarato modello, al pari di Darwin), ma ad una nuova pretesa di possesso sul mondo.

The burgeoning scholarship on Western health films stands in stark contrast to the vacuum in the historical conceptualization of Eastern European films. This book develops a nonlinear historical model that revises their unique role in the inception of national cinematography and establishing supranational health security. Readers witness the revelation of an unknown history concerning how the health films produced in Eastern European countries not only adopted Western patterns of propaganda but actively participated in its formation, especially with regard to those considered "others": Women and the populations of the periphery. The authors elaborate on the long "echo" of the discursive practices introduced by health films within public health propaganda, as well as the attempts to negate and deconstruct such practices by rebellious filmmakers. A wide range of methods, including the analysis of the sociological biographies of filmmakers, the historical reconstruction of public campaigns against diseases and an investigation into the production of health films, contextualizes these films along a multifaceted continuum stretching between the adaptation of global patterns and the cultivation of national authenticities. The book is aimed at those who study the history of film, the history of public health, Central and Eastern European countries and global history.

The paper retraces the history of the relationships which led the library San Giorgio of Pistoia, in October 2017, to be the seat of the conference on the operative human libraries in Italy and to face the human library’s trademark. The piece analyzes also the topic of the possible agreements between social library as a service and human library as an event of cultural provocation, from the point of view of the inspiring values and the transformations which are able to support people’s ways of thinking.