Is there room for school books in our libraries? The contribution of national Italian Bibliography

Abstract

After a pause lasting many years, the national Italian Bibliography (NIB) has resumed a current description of manuals for High Schools. It has thus brought its procedure into line with other national European bibliographies and recovered its bibliographic control over a publishing family long neglected in our information overview. In recent years school publishing has undergone many innovations, connected not only to new normative arrangements, but also to typographically renewed types of books, provided with multimedia supports, increasingly less linked to the teaching of a specific subject in a particular school, but capable of a transversal enjoyment, according to different scholastic lines of study. Various issues have been broached, with regard to the management of this material:

• as regards bibliographic control: for the national Italian Bibliography a separate series has been arranged, indicated by the letter D (Didactics) from which however “extracurricular” is excluded for the moment;
• as regards cataloguing, both descriptive and semantic choices;
• as regards relations with SBN about the possibility of shared choices and possible retrieval of records already present;
• as regards the users and addressees of the new product.

It should not be excluded that in regard to this sector of editorial products, forms of agreement can be reached with contiguous situations, jobs in common with other libraries or institutes of documentation, with the aim of bringing out in the open a sector of Italian publishing long neglected.