Open access has changed. At the beginning of the millennium, it was portrayed in a romanticizing way and was embedded in a conceptual ensemble of participation, democratization, digital commons and equality. Nowadays, open access seems to be exclusive: to the extent that commercial players have discovered it as a business model and article fees…[Read more]

The city of Lucca was never limited to the urban area within the walls. Autumn and winter would be lived in the city palazzo, with life concentrating upon commercial activities enlivened by entertainments such as music and theatre. In spring and summer life was relocated en masse to the villa. This article outlines the essentials of Lucchese…[Read more]

The garden theatre can take many forms: it can erupt forth in an explosion of water and sound as in the teatro d’acqua; it can appear carved into a hedge as a teatro di verzura; or it can calmly wait to be filled with performers as in a teatro avanti il palazzo. The garden theatre was first a feature of the Baroque garden in Italy, before f…[Read more]

As cultural heritage collections become available online they carry the promise of ‘access’ – new audiences, new uses, new understandings. But access is never simply open. Limits are imposed, structures are defined, categories are created. Decisions are made about what gets digitised and why. This chapter will describe a series of exper…[Read more]

The process of managing information in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design projects remained relatively unchanged between publication of works of Bavarian theorist Albrecht Dürer and French mathematician Gaspard Monge in the 1500s and 1700s respectively, and the widespread adoption of computer aided design (CAD) in the early…[Read more]

Der Markt für wissenschaftliche Informationen hat in den letzten Jahrzehnten einen enormen Konzentrationsprozess durchlaufen, und zwar nicht nur was Publikationen, sondern Produkte des gesamten akademischen Workflows betrifft. Dies könnte am Ende zu einem „end-to-end lock-in” führen. Sowohl um dieser Entwicklung etwas entgegenzusetzen als auch…[Read more]

Given the unique cultural artifacts and ephemera contained in music libraries, music librarians spend much of our time concerned with the description of materials that fall outside the mainstream expectations of descriptive cataloging. Such diverse objects include dance manuals, record carriers, magazines, posters, and other promotional materials.…[Read more]

Shared productivity applications like Google Docs have become commonplace in libraries, but there are many other free, web-based resources that librarians can use for staff management and collaboration. Library staff at BGSU have been using applications such as Dropbox, Hiveminder, and Floorplanner, as well as many others, for such tasks. We will…[Read more]

Social justice and critical theory frameworks have been utilized to discuss library pedagogy and cataloging, but librarians have been slow in applying critical theory to how we actually manage libraries and lead staff. Management is not glamorous; rather, many still hold the traditional view of management as upholding hierarchical values. At its…[Read more]

Librarians have been publicly voicing dissent towards neutrality since at least the 1980s, when a number of radical librarians coming out of the climate of social upheaval in the 1960s-1970s began to call for a re-examination of the idea of library neutrality (Dick 220). Individuals on the margins have been writing on this topic for decades, but…[Read more]

Profiling the Samuel Becket collection at the University of Reading

The present article seeks to dig into Gustave Doré’s (1832-1883) vision of the Wood of the Suicides from his illustrations of the Divine Comedy (d. 1861), establishing a comparison between its critical reception, the works that have illustrated the chant over the centuries and Doré’s works themselves. A goal here is to glimpse if negative criti…[Read more]

Libraries are always entangled in their cultures, and that means American libraries have always interacted with, adopted, and at the same time resisted capitalist assumptions about human behavior. We will explore that fraught relationship by looking at the past, and in particular looking at moments when some of the core values we so often fail to…[Read more]