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Aims This article explores the care British nurses provided to victims of typhus during the Second World War. Background Typhus is associated with poverty and overcrowding. During wars in the pre-antibiotic era, civilians were particularly susceptible to epidemics, which military governments feared would spread to their troops. Design This discussion paper draws on archival data from three typhus epidemics in the Second World War to examine the expert work of British nurses in caring for victims during these potential public health disasters. Data Sources The published sources for the paper include material from nursing and medical journals published between 1940-1947. Archival sources come from the National Archives in Kew, the Wellcome Library and the Army Medical Services Museum, between 1943-1945. Of particular interest is the correspondence with Dame Katharine Jones from nurses on active service overseas. Implications for Nursing Whilst epidemics of typhus are now rare, nurses in the present day may be required to care for the public in environments of extreme poverty and overcrowding, where life-threatening infectious diseases are prevalent. This article has demonstrated that it is possible for expert and compassionate nursing to alleviate suffering and prevent death, even when medical technologies are unavailable. Conclusion Expert and compassionate care, adequate nutrition and hydration and attention to hygiene needs are crucial when there are limited pharmacological treatments and medical technologies available to treat infectious diseases. The appreciation of this could have implications for nurses working in current global conflicts. [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]

In the nowadays world characterized by complexity, the digital systems for archival and bibliographic description are, especially in Italy, a faithful mirror of too many horizontal (among bodies with national functions) and vertical (among central and peripheral levels) complications. The integration of data sets conceived according to the up-to-date conceptual domain models would simplify the dynamics of representation, improve user experiences, and optimize the environmental costs of computing infrastructures. The concepts to be shared should relate to agents (individual or collective), places, and chronological data, deepening on how to address the more complex issues opened by things. This paper introduces three possible scenarios of semantic cooperation between archivists and librarians, not necessarily alternative: activating a conceptual matching through common entities, relying on a neutral semantic data infrastructure such as Wikidata, or, finally, developing a transversal core ontology. Hoping that disciplinary boundaries will not impede cooperation, two types of impediments must be considered: the organizational one (bottom-up, top-down, or a virtuous synergy between the two organizational models?) and the crucial issue of offering easy-to-use interfaces to end users, not only constituted by software agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical survey about the origins of ethnographic collections of Tierra del Fuego in Italian museums, as well as the historical records these institutions. The historical records of ethnographical museums are paramount archives to unveil the history of the objects, specially its acquisition and the historical context of the Italian institutions at that time. At the same time, ethnographical collections may be considered as documentary archives offering essential information about the social and material productive contexts of every item of the collections. Finally, a second aim of this paper is to offer relevant data about ethnographical Fuegian collections in Italy to Spanish speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have paid an increasing attention to the estimation of efficiency in the public sector. Archives constitute an exception notwithstanding their cultural and historical relevance. This paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to fill this lacuna. The analysis of the performance of archives raises theoretical issues because their outputs have characteristics of a pure public good (preservation) and of a private service (utilisation). Moreover, the trade-off between the long and short-run goals of, respectively, preservation and utilisation is central in most public policies concerning heritage. We address this issue by studying the efficiency of public historical archives (PHAs) in Italy, over the period 2011–2012. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and implement one-stage and two-stage approaches to investigate PHAs' performance in the management of their different and potentially conflicting functions. Our analysis shows that PHAs perform better in the preservation function, considering the objectives and constraints they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1982, in the course of transferring the archive of the De Paoli family of Porciorasco to the Museo Contadino di Cassego (eastern Ligurian Apennines), a manuscript herbal dated about 1598 was discovered. The document is analysed here in all its aspect: the materials (paper, inks and pigments), the plants represented, the iconographical models, and the archival context. The result is a hypothesis about the circulation of knowledge about natural history in the area where it was found and used between the late sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As for the iconographical sources, models were found in both manuscripts and printed books from the medico-botanical tradition, including Hortus sanitatis and Tractatus de virtutibus herbarum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore the role that accounting systems effectively played in managing the internal relationships among the various administrative bodies of the Comune (City State) of Siena in the 14th century. This period was characterized by an ever increasing need to monitor economic activities, a need perceived by the Comune with regard to all those who were entrusted with the management of public funds. In particular, in 1358 an office was created specifically to review the accounts of the camarlenghi (who were in charge of the management of public funds) nominated by the Comune of Siena. The office was originally staffed by three temporary Riveditori (auditors) and later by a permanent commission of Regolatori (regulators). On the basis of archival sources, so abundant on 14th century Siena, this paper analyses the changing relationships among the various administrative bodies of the Comune, in particular detail the Gabella generale and the Biccherna (which were the offices in charge of managing the main cash inflows and outflows pertaining to the administration of the Comune) and the activities of the Regolatori. By interpreting accounting systems as a set of rules (i.e., the formalised statements of procedures), roles (the network of social positions), and routines (the practices habitually in use), the present study shows that, since the Middle Ages, accounting has played a central role in the management of internal interdependencies and in the construction of organisational order. In the case of the Comune in the 14th century, accounting practices were capable of regulating, legitimising and balancing relations of power, dependency and autonomy among the different bodies of the same organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a survey of the academic staff of the Faculties of Economics and Law of the University of Brescia, Italy. The survey sought to determine knowledge and use of Open-Access archives and to verify the conditions stated by the correspondents for their participation in an institutional Open-Access initiative. The response rate to the questionnaire was 57.9% (62 authors). Results show that 44% of the respondents (25 of 57) knew about the existence of Open-Access initiatives and archives. Of those aware of the existence of Open-Access archives, only 4% (1 in 25) affirmed they had already used them to deposit papers, while 33% (16 of 48), among those who declared they use materials freely available on the Web, affirmed they had used an Open-Access disciplinary archive. Sixty-one percent (41 of 62) of the respondents answered they were prepared to archive personally their own scientific or educational material in an institutional repository, once the conditions that they request have been fulfilled. The study illustrates the crucial role that authors play in the process of diffusion of Open-Access initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a summary and overview of Italian records related to the Second World War held in Italian archives, with particular emphasis on the military records which may offer detailed insights, at every level, into Italian politics, strategy, and conduct of the war. Until recently these have been seldom used by non-Italian historians, and their wider use will help to fill a major gap in historical research, though limited access to many archives and the dispersal of records are still likely to hamper any large-scale research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes on the one hand to outline Italian initiatives regarding open archives, with a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis, focusing in particular on data providers and on organisation and initiatives that lead to integration that encourage the development of IRs. On the other hand, it proposes to analyse the 20 years of Italian input to SIGLE in order to verify if and to what extent the Italian producers participating in SIGLE have contributed to the fostering of new ways of sharing and diffusing information sources produced within their organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]