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Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie różnych sposobów zarządzania informacją w wybranych krakowskich bibliotekach akademickich. Do badania wyłoniono cztery z książnic naukowych w Krakowie, tj. Bibliotekę Jagiellońską, Bibliotekę Główną AGH, Bibliotekę Główną Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego oraz Bibliotekę Politechniki Krakowskiej. W artykule zostały porównane i poddane analizie usługi oferowane przez biblioteki dla różnych grup użytkowników. Omówione zostały przede wszystkim usługi świadczone przez jednostki odpowiedzialne za udzielanie informacji naukowej. Wśród nich znalazły się między innymi: kwerendy, analizy bibliometryczne, szkolenia grupowe, a także spersonalizowane kursy. W artykule zostały przedstawione także rozwiązania, jakimi dysponują wyłonione na potrzeby badania instytucje, których zamierzeniem jest podnoszenie kompetencji informacyjnych użytkowników dzisiejszych bibliotek.

W artykule poddano analizie jedną z publikacji autorstwa Danuty Mostwin, wydaną przez Instytut Literacki w Paryżu w 1961 r., czyli książkę pt. Ameryko! Ameryko! Jej fragmenty zostały wcześniej opublikowane jako opowiadania, zapowiadające fragment większej całości, na łamach paryskiej „Kultury”. Następnie została wydana jako tom w serii „Biblioteki Kultury”. Kolejnym etapem było jej udostępnienie, również we fragmentach na falach Radia Wolna Europa oraz wybranych tytułach prasowych. Do książki odnoszono się również w licznych recenzjach prasowych i pogadankach radiowych. Współcześnie, dzięki digitalizacji źródeł Instytutu Literackiego, funkcjonuje w wersji elektronicznej na stronie internetowej – portalu paryskiej „Kultury”. W przeprowadzonych pracach posłużono się metodą analizy zawartości wraz z analizą porównawczą. Podczas badania materiałów prasowych i źródeł archiwalnych wykorzystano analizę genologiczną. Na przykładzie wymienionej publikacji zwrócono zatem uwagę na obecność książki w przestrzeni medialnej, akcentując wymiar historyczny, a także odniesienia do współczesnych możliwości, które pozwalają na jej dotarcie do czytelników.

Tekst przybliża zjawisko tzw. fanzinów mangowych, czyli niezależnych, wydawanych własnym sumptem czasopism poświęconych zagadnieniu popkultury japońskiej, tworzonych przez osoby zafascynowane tym tematem i skierowanych do ludzi podzielających to zainteresowanie. Autor artykułu skupia się na omówieniu najstarszych polskich magazynów tego typu, wprowadzonych do obiegu wewnątrz subkulturowego w latach 1995–1997 i prezentuje ich charakterystyki bibliologiczno-historyczne. W pracy omówiono aż dziesięć polskich fanzinów mangowych, w tym krakowski fanzin „Kawaii”, czyli najstarsze rodzime czasopismo tego typu.

Niepełnosprawność to trudny temat, tak jak śmierć, choroba czy wojna. Według Narodowego Spisu Powszechnego Ludności i Mieszkań z 2021 r. osoby niepełnosprawne stanowią ponad 14% polskiego społeczeństwa. Niestety książki dla dzieci o niepełnosprawności nadal odgrywają marginalną rolę na polskim rynku wydawniczym. Autorka koncentruje się na analizie dostępności i popularności książek dla dzieci o niepełnosprawności na polskim rynku wydawniczym, posługując się w tym celu metodą bibliograficzną i analizą treści, a także na roli i znaczeniu ilustracji na wybranych przykładach z lat 2018–2022. Badanie podkreśla znaczenie ilustracji jako narzędzia komunikacji oraz potrzebę lepszej reprezentacji tematyki niepełnosprawności w literaturze dziecięcej. Wnioski dostarczają ważnych informacji autorom, wydawcom, pedagogom i rodzicom, a także stanowią punkt wyjścia do dalszych badań nad wpływem ilustracji na percepcję czytelników i kontynuację tematyki w omawianym obszarze literatury.

This article introduces the FIRST Values Framework, a conceptual marketing thinking tool designed to foster empathy in library marketing by aligning strategies with core values and community needs. The framework enhances user-centered design and engagement efforts through five values: fellow-feeling, identification, responsiveness, self-awareness, and thoughtfulness. The literature discusses the significance of empathy in libraries, empathetic marketing, relationship marketing, and incorporating empathy into staff training for service design, highlighting the essential need for empathic connections in library services. The article discusses the integration of empathy across different contexts by briefly comparing the FIRST Values Framework with existing models like design thinking and human-centered design. Practical steps for implementing the framework in libraries are provided, ensuring marketing and outreach efforts are empathetic, user-centered, and impactful.

This study explores how academic libraries use humor to communicate their value and services to their university community through social media. This study is a content analysis of posts created by a sampling of seven academic library Instagram and TikTok accounts. The study reviews and categorizes the multiple types of humor present among the particular content analyzed by looking at the combinations of humor types and then separating them out for individual analysis. This analysis shows that while Comparison and Silliness humor types were the most prevalent in the social media posts reviewed, Exaggeration received the highest average numbers of likes and comments. Sarcasm received the second most average likes, while Comparison received the second highest average number of comments per post. These findings suggest that expanding the usage of Exaggeration, Sarcasm, and Comparison in library social media content strategy could encourage engagement from audiences.

In 2021, the Houston Cole Library (HCL) at Jacksonville State University (Jacksonville, AL) added a mascot to enhance social media posts, and the result has been successful. HCL’s simple low-cost mascot has consistently stimulated positive interactions between the library staff/faculty and students, community members and university officials. HCL’s library mascot has created a cult-like following that watches and comments on his adventures. This current discussion indicates how any library can create their own mascot regardless of budget restrictions and time commitments.

This article describes the challenges, goals and opportunities of impact-oriented communication for academic libraries using the example of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. The article describes how the ZBW is working to strengthen its perception as a competent partner and promoter of Open Science (hereafter OS) among its main target group of economists in order to communicate its transformed mission. This article describes the path from the challenges and goals to the concrete communication activities and the evaluation of the impact-oriented communication work.

This article analyzes the process and analytics of the promotion of an asynchronous scholarly communications educational challenge in the setting of an academic health sciences library. The campaign used a content marketing strategy to create interest in and illustrate the importance of each day of the challenge. The campaign resulted in a click-through rate of approximately 8.7%, 63 sign-ups, and 546 research guide views. The reflections on this campaign unveil potential pitfalls and opportunities when marketing to researchers and others interested in scholarly communications.

The COVID-19 pandemic led a library marketing and communication team to question how they were doing everything. Brainstorming sessions and serendipitous technology discoveries led to a media-literacy focused livestream show produced by the team in concert with library faculty and staff from other departments. The result was two successful seasons of a show that brought scholars into conversation with librarians to demonstrate the ways in which expertise can and does lead to answers to questions, and how finding information is only the start of finding those answers—finding credible sources is critical. The show attempts to provide the tools necessary to make those distinctions.

This article reviews five free online email design platforms that libraries can use to create visually appealing and engaging email newsletters and other email communications. The five platforms reviewed in this article – Beefree, Mosaico, Smore, Stripo, and Tabular – are assessed according to ease of use, the availability of pre-designed templates, and other features, such as the ability to add collaborators. This review begins with a summary of the library and marketing literature on email communications, including best practices, and ends with a brief overview of email marketing platforms and services.

An exercise in AI driven publishing

The current and predominant school of thought in academic publishing, with a correspondingly rigorously implemented set of ethical policies, notes that classic authorship is a purely human endeavor. However, such rigid conceptual restrictions on authorship for artificial intelligence (AI), like large language models (LLMs), may be borne from fear, emerging perhaps from being intellectually threatened by AI/LLMs that might outperform humans. In this paper, considering several caveats, a world of academic publishing in which AI/LLMs are offered a fair opportunity of authorship, coined AI-authorship, is envisioned.

This article employs the psychosocial theories of Erik Erikson on identity development to negotiate the growth and learning process of Esperanza Cordero, the young adolescent heroine of Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street (1984). The article not only negotiates the interplay between social and psychological aspects of identity construction but also reads Esperanza’s identity in the light of the relationship between Erikson’s fifth developmental stage (Identity vs. Confusion) and both the preceding stage (Industry vs. Inferiority) as well as the next stage (Intimacy vs. Isolation). As a novel of education and character building, The House on Mango Street manifests a necessary overlap between genre and theme, and thus a preoccupation with learning from the world through interacting variables like sensory perceptions, peer pressure, and direct experiences. The protagonist in this formative novel, being an adolescent in a crucial stage of receiving influences, seeks knowledge about the external world as well as her identity. Feelings of shame and non-belonging govern her thoughts about the house on Mango Street. Thus, Cisneros uses the house on Mango Street as a sustained trope for identity construction and personality growth. Ultimately, Esperanza finds her identity as an emerging artist (a poet and writer); and this gives her inner peace, freedom, and emotional stability to decide to come back and help other women in her community. Moreover, it is when she finds a “house” of her own within her heart she can overcome her anxieties and come to terms with her shabby neighborhood and small family house. The conclusion draws on some relevant literary contexts to establish the social commitment of the young artist as a measure of integration and success.

Natsuo Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle has been so far analyzed from various standpoints by researchers such as Copeland (2018), Dumas (2018), Qiao (2018), and Lianying (2018), most of them being connected to feminism. This article takes another approach and deals with the issue of trauma and death as a literary representation as portrayed in the novel. The paper demonstrates how implementing myth in a revised form helps Kirino to depict trauma in a literary text – the task that many researchers of trauma studies deem impossible. At the center of this paper’s analysis are the main mythologems of traditional Japanese culture retold from the female viewpoint, connecting the fate of the goddess to the fate of a mortal woman: the latter in many ways repeats what happened in the “divine” story. The repetitions create a mythological cyclical description of life as well as its tragedy perceived as traumatic experiences, which is characteristic of the writer’s novels, and outline a universal archetype of human behavior. This paper attempts to analyze these mythologemes in connection to trauma studies and shows that, if put in the fantastic (in this case, mythological) realm, representation of trauma becomes possible.

Since its invention, photography has been imbued with the promise of providing a sense of fullness and has been believed to possess the unique capacity to capture the entirety of a moment. On the other hand, such assumed potentiality to capture all is yet found subject to the surface, and photography turns out to be a sort of art that lacks depth. This paper intends to focus on the tension between surface and depth in the representation of photographs in literature, a topic that is often neglected in literary studies. Through the theoretical lens of Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s discourses on photography, this paper examines Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, both of which expose the discrepancy between what is visible on the surface and what lies beneath, as well as between what is within the frame and what exists beyond it. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how Benjamin’s and Barthes’s discourses on photography lead to the discussion of the surface and depth issues. The second part deals with the photographs in the two literary works, exploring how theoretical concepts of photography, including Benjamin’s “the optical unconscious” and Barthes’s “punctum,” will help shed light on them. By juxtaposing critical discourses on photography with these literary works, this paper concludes that their representation of photographs grapples with the tension between surface and depth and resonates with Benjamin’s and Barthes’s notions on photography.

This paper aims to investigate the depiction of Irish rural life in selected poems by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. Modern Irish poetry presents two contrasting perspectives on the portrayal of rural Ireland. Some poets like W. B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney, along with other leading Irish poets, romanticize the Irish countryside, portraying it as charming, magnificent, and idyllic. These poets prefer to live in tune with nature, tempted by its pastoral landscape and inspired by its idealized tranquility. In contrast, other modern Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Michael Hartnett, and many others, reject this idealized vision of the countryside. Instead, they offer a stark portrayal of rural Ireland, exposing its harsh realities and revealing the poverty, struggles, and hardships encountered by Irish peasants. This article, accordingly, seeks to explore these two different literary traditions within modern Irish poetry, with a focus on W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh as representatives of opposing attitudes. Specifically, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh serve as the concentration for this study. In reaching its conclusions, the article finally reveals the divergent perspectives portrayed within the two poems, highlighting how Yeats and Kavanagh employ distinct poetic techniques to present their attitudes, sharply contrasting each other.

Service delivery is an integral part of the activities that must be regularly performed by the personnel of any library, especially in academic libraries. This review paper focused on the analytical factors that could boost the service delivery among staff in academic libraries. These include quality of library services, user satisfaction, user engagement, staff performance, access to information, library usage, and the academic performance of students. The paper reviewed relevant literature on each of the outlined factors to enable library staff to know how each factor would boost their service delivery job in their various libraries where they are saddled with the task of providing relevant educational resources in meeting the information needs of readers. To this end, it is expedient for the library management to seek and put in place those motivating factors that would improve the service delivery of its staff in the academic community. Also, the library management should engage their staff on the necessity of meeting the information needs of readers as they look up to the library as their last hope in getting relevant information for their academic and research activities. Besides, the institution’s management should give adequate support and provision for training and retraining of its workforce especially the library staff to enhance their productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how birds and avian metaphors are used by Arab writers in diaspora to reflect themes of exile, displacement and dispersion. In particular, in Inaam Kachachi’s The Dispersal (2023) and Walid Nabhan’s Exodus of the Storks (2021) birds and avian images are thematically and aesthetically significant motifs since the covers of some editions of the two novels feature a scene from each novel in which birds are of great importance to some characters, key events and sociopolitical, historical and cultural contexts of the texts. The deployment of these imageries on the covers of some editions represents a relatively recent tendency adopted by Western publishers to reflect the complex nature of literary representations of recent developments in the Middle East rather than relying on a long history of Orientalism to mediate this process of presentation. Furthermore, the study draws on the tripartite division of the notion of translation by Roman Jakobson (1959), particularly, his notion of the intersemiotic translation to highlight the links between a novel’s cover design and the themes that it depicts.

This article analyses Xiaolu Guo’s 2020 novel A Lover’s Discourse. It follows the novel’s unnamed protagonist, a young Chinese woman who moves to London, traces her journey through the concept of mooring. The article examines this notion of mooring through the intimate connections that the protagonist makes with the place that she lives in and through her relationship with her partner. Using the concept of moorings as a theoretical background, the article discusses what moorings mean for the protagonist. It focuses on the theme of floating and the idea of home to outline a pursuit of finding mooring that rests in the protagonist’s desire to belong in the world. Moorings, this article argues, are affective and represent an individual’s desire to belong. This desire is affected by the individual’s experiences in life, influencing their state of being and ways of living. For the unnamed protagonist, the expectation of mooring is rooted in the possibilities of the future where her sense of living is not lost and is retained along with her sense of being together with her companion.

Power outages have become pervasive in many Global South countries causing serious disruption to economies, psycho-social well-being, and industries including libraries. Occasionally, these power outages and their implications are felt in Global North countries too, mainly as a result of natural disasters whose occurrence has become too common due to global warming. This study sought to assess the impact of power outages on library services. The method employed was desk research which relied on a literature review and the lived experiences of the researcher who is based in South Africa, one of the countries that experienced almost daily periodic power outages as a result of the imposition of load shedding. The results show that power outages disrupt daily services of libraries resulting in difficulties in accessing electronic resources and services causing library hours to be adjusted and even closures. Power outages often lead to great frustration and anger from clients and librarians alike. Based on the available literature, some remedies are suggested to cushion the blow to clients and libraries. However, these remedies can only be temporary solutions. Ultimately, it is recommended that libraries should tackle the issue of load shedding collectively by either negotiating favourable deals with alternative energy providers and/or in negotiations with governments to, as far as possible, exempt and prioritise libraries in cases of power outages. This will aid in stemming the negative effects on education, access to information, and other efforts to actualise sustainable development.

The essay studies the different manifestations of the concept of antiquity in relation to the edition of Osservazioni di Ennio Quirino Visconti su due musaici, sponsored by the Spanish diplomat José Nicolás de Azara and produced at the Stamperia Reale run by the printer Giambattista Bodoni in Parma in 1788. The artistic and cultural context of the work and the agents involved in the material production process of the volume are examined, dwelling on the content and values conveyed. Starting from the interpretations of two ancient mosaics, the Osservazioni redefine the concept of antiquarian object, which is embodied in the volume itself as an object of bibliophilia, with its symbolic value (artistic, historical-antiquarian and identity) and its relation to contemporary and future consumers. The methodology adopted is critical-documentary, using the Azara-Bodoni correspondence as primary source, and theoretical-critical for the interpretive approach.

The article aims to introduce Traniello's paper "L'eclissi delle biblioteche nel dibattito politico italiano," which serves as an effective synthesis of the development of the organization of Italian public libraries and an analysis of the political debate that has arisen over the years. Furthermore, the paper is a testimony to the author's original approach to these themes and contains much food for thought that testifies to his civic passion. Emphasizing the importance of improving and expanding a network of efficient and accessible library services, the paper underscores the significance of this endeavor in nation-building efforts.

The essay provides the first results derived from the study of the biblical lexicon of the Laudi attributed to Saint Catherine of Bologna, born Caterina Vigri. The perspective of the research extends to the entire collection, which is of considerable interest being the poetic production of a learned religious woman of the Fifteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the religious lexicon of Lauda IV, which is transmitted in three codices now in the General Archiepiscopal Archive of Bologna. The Lauda is attributed to the Bolognese saint by Illuminata Bembo, Catherine’s sister at the Corpus Domini Monastery in Bologna and her first biographer, who reports it in the Specchio di illuminazione. The conclusions of the analysis will be exemplary of the richer and more systematic ones that will arise from the analysis of the other lauds, with the aim of contributing to the possible preparation of a glossary of the lexicon of biblical origin in Caterina Vigri’s poetic work.

The paper examines the manuscripts and printed editions of Medieval and Humanistic works preserved in the library of Castiglione del Terziere, highlighting Bononi’s preference for writings in the historiographic genre, with specific regard to the history of Florence. Among the volumes examined – all ancient editions, incunabula and cinquecentine, extremely valuable and rare – we dwell above all on the exemplars (by Leonardo Bruni, Biondo Flavio, Iacopo Foresti) that bear Bononi’s autograph annotations, because they testify to his interest in the geographical area of Lunigiana and Dante’s biography.

The paper examines the Leopardian materials acquired and preserved by Loris Bononi at the library of the Centro Studi Umanistici Niccolò V in Castiglione del Terziere. The discourse opens by investigating the relationship between Bononi and Leopardi and the possible influences of the latter on the former's writing (both published and unpublished). The analysis of the Leopardi's sections begins with the ‘self-description’ the poet made of himself in a letter to Carlo Pepoli, which is part of this collection. The second part of the essay is devoted to the unpublished manuscripts of Giacomo’s sister, Paolina, and Carlo Leopardi’s wife, Teresa Teja: three letters allowing the reconstruction of the biographical context of two figures who contributed to keeping alive the first hand memory of Leopardi.

After the emergency caused by the flood in Romagna in May 2023, the Manfrediana Library decided to dedicate an exhibition to the manuscript heritage, with an evocative journey through more than six centuries of history: from 12th-century fragments, recovered from the bindings of notarial registers, through famous medieval codices, such as Bonadies' collection of music and Felice Feliciano's epigraphic sylloge, to the testimonies of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the unpublished novel by the American journalist Edward Prime-Stevenson.

This paper presents the Aristotelian volume (comprising two Venetian editions bound together) that originally belonged to Ulisse Aldrovandi, was later owned by Loris Jacopo Bononi, and is now housed at the library of the Terziere castle. Following an essential introduction to Aldrovandi's library and its organization, the author describes the volume and focuses on Aldrovandi's marginal notes on the Sixteenth-century edition of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata (translated by Theodoro Gaza) with the commentary by Pietro da Abano. Three of these annotations are particularly significant as Aldrovandi explicitly refers to the Problemata and the commentary in this copy in at least two of his printed works (Monstrorum historia and Quadrupedum historia).

The essay provides news and publishes the text of a short handwritten letter (unknown until today) by Marcel Proust addressed to a «chère Madame». The letter, purchased by Bononi and hung under glass on one of the walls of his library, forms a sort of diptych with a pencil portrait of the great French writer very similar to the famous one painted in 1892 by Jacques-Émile Blanche.

The invention of movable type printing was followed by a fundamental technical development, which influenced the way in which a text was produced: the replacement of the original one-pull press with the two-pull press, which made it possible to print two pages at a time with a single pull of the press. Lotte Hellinga, following a survey of quarto format editions printed in printing shops in various locations, suggests that the first occurrence of the new technology is to be attributed to the beginning of 1472 and to Georg Lauer's printing shop in Rome. Following some reflections that take Hellinga's study as a point of departure, other parameters are described that allow to establish which printing press was used in the production of a certain edition. Once the methodology applied in the analysis of incunabula printed in Rome has been described, four cases are illustrated, which highlight the complexity of the topic.

The paper focuses on Andrea Caronti, an almost unknown librarian who worked at the University Library of Bologna from 1830 to 1882, author of numerous catalogues of great relevance. The paper traces his biography, based on both published and unpublished sources, and describes the most important works he carried out at the Library (above all, the author catalogue). The modernity and usefulness of Caronti’s catalogue is evident, proved by the fact that it is still used by the librarians. It should also be used to plan new (and necessary) cataloging projects for the incunabula owned by the University Library of Bologna.

Cataloguing ancient book collections in a library paying attention to the material evidences of each copy means a better knowledge of both the old provenances and the history of the institution. It also makes a wealth of valuable information accessible to scholars and a wider audience. The example of INC 4 128, a protagonist in a book exhibition held in Bergamo in 2023, shows how worth the MEI database cataloguing of Sixteenth-century printed books in the Biblioteca Civica «A. Mai» has been.

The paper briefly describes the book exhibition All’alba della stampa. Itinerari tra gli incunaboli della Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia, set on display at the Salone Teresiano of the University Library of Pavia between March 4 and May 24, 2024. The aim of the event is to promote the Pavia University Library’s incunabula collection, of which the PRIN 2017 project - The Dawn of Italian Publishing. Technology, Texts and Books in Central and Northern Italy in the XVth and XVIth centuries helped to complete the identification of each material evidence within the Material Evidence in Incunabula database (MEI). Three itineraries are foreseen: the first is expressly dedicated to the first printing production in Pavia, followed by a selection of illuminated incunabula and finally a group of books printed in Bologna, chosen to pay homage to the partnership between the Alma Mater Studiorum and the Pavia University Library.

The essay focuses on the library of the castle of Castiglione del Terziere, in the Apennines, established by the physician and bibliophile Loris Jacopo Bononi (1929-2012). It belongs to the still little-studied typology of private libraries located outside the cities, but open to public use. With authentic bibliophile passion, Bononi created a collection of books closely linked to the history of the Lunigiana area, to the authors of the Italian Humanism and Renaissance, and to Italian literature, from its origins to the Nineteenth century. The library has always been open to scholars and visitors, and in the near future the analytical cataloging of the entire book heritage would be necessary, as well as the valorisation through digital technologies.

This paper presents the editions of Sixteenth-century poems preserved in the library of the castle of Castiglione del Terziere. Within this corpus it is possible to identify three focuses: the editions of Orlando furioso and other works by Ariosto; the editions of other chivalric poems, showing the articulation of the genre between the end of the Fifteenth-century and the second half of the Sixteenth-century; and finally, the numerous editions of Gerusalemme liberata and other works by Tasso. Indeed, it is precisely the collection of works by Tasso – which includes in particular the first editions, illustrated editions and vernacular translations of the Liberata – that constitutes one of the most important aspects of Loris Jacopo Bononi’s book collection.

The essay aims to examine the impact of the first Italian Book Exhibition, held in Buenos Aires in 1927, on the Argentinian cultural environment of the time. Through the analysis of several archival documents and a variety of articles published in the local press and Italian journals and newspapers, the research reconstructs the stages of the events’ organization and realization, highlighting the context in which the different actors involved worked for its success. The documentary materials give the opportunity to outline, in an accurate manner, the press assessments of the initiative. The study makes use of primary sources, secondary sources, archival materials and scholarly bibliography.

The article describes the project for the survey of incunabula belonging to the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. The Fifteenth-century printed editions, currently scattered within the collections of the BUB, have been identified through shelf checks and historical catalogs. The analysis and cataloging work of the incunabula started by inserting descriptions into the online catalog of SBN. All specimen data have also been recorded: marginalia, attention marks, owners, provenance, ownership notes, stamps, and binding. Noteworthy is the recent discovery of an incunabulum by Ulisse Aldrovandi, considered lost for many decades. The volume has finally returned to the massive heritage of the BUB and will undergo some conservation intervention in the coming months.

This work delves into the papers of the most significant and rare Petrarchian editions - including incunabula and cinquecentine - contained in the precious book collection of Jacopo Loris Bononi preserved in Castiglione del Terziere. It investigates the peculiar characteristics and cultural contexts that gave rise to the individual prints, the possession notes and the heterogeneous typology of annotations and marginal notes found in the volumes, opening up unprecedented scenarios of responsive readers interacting in various ways with the text.

Following a few considerations on the role of catalogues as primary sources for the history of book trade in the early modern period, the article focuses on the series of indices librorum published by Aldus Manutius and his heirs over a century (1497-1597). The article will then present a selection of issues and topics that will be developed in the course of some wider research, devoted to exploring the use of catalogues as advertising ploys by the Aldine press.