Sebastiano Miccoli | Urbino "Carlo Bo" (original) (raw)

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Papers by Sebastiano Miccoli

History and significance of copyright. Copyrightis a topical issue for today libraries and for al... more History and significance of copyright.
Copyrightis a topical issue for today libraries and for all the cultural industries stakeholders – from publishers to individual users. What legitimate use can you make of intellectual work? What kind of use restrictions can copyright holders establish? What’s the author’s property on his work? Today is difficult to give a clear answer to these and many other questions.
The paper analyses Chiara De Vecchis and Paolo Traniello’sbook (La proprietà del pensiero, 2012)investigating the copyright from an historical, theoretical and legal point of view – with the aim of contributing to the development of a culture of copyright which would take into consideration the reader's rights as well as the author’s rights, and would let librarians play their traditional role of mediators between works protected/promoted by intellectual property rights and patrons’ information needs, in a context that has extremely changed in the last decades.

On the future of the book. The second Unesco Forum on culture and cultural industries. To write,... more On the future of the book. The second Unesco Forum on culture and cultural industries.

To write, publish,read, preserve and lend a book are actions thatfive hundred years of printing have made habitual for everyone of us. All the same, we naturally recognize the several parts of the book industry: the publisher, the bookseller, the library etc. ICTs have considerably changed this context in a different way compared to what happened with other cultural products. The introduction of the MP3 format in music, forinstance, involved a change of support for an essentially identical product, whereas the digital book seems to imply a radical change of form too. An e-book cannot be called a book in the traditional sense of the word, as it can contain hypertext, multimedia and interactive elements that make it more similar to an oral storytelling rather than to a written text.
The book industry all over the world is deeply involved in this substantial change. Writing, publishing, selling and reading a book will never be the same, and the roles and places of the books' supply chain – the publisher, the bookseller, the library etc. – are changing quickly.
The second Unesco World Forum on culture and cultural industries (Monza, 6-8 June 2011) dealt with “The book tomorrow: the future of the written word”, and focused on three essential issues resulting from this new setting: the e-book economy, the future of copyright, and the function of the library in the digital environment. This paper presents some of the results of a wide discussion that involved major experts in the field, suggesting that – given the extent of the issues at stake – the future of the book has just began.

The essay takes its cue from some Italian contributions regarding the organization and management... more The essay takes its cue from some Italian contributions regarding the organization and management of some user-friendly librarian services and from the observation that the strategic objective of the majority of libraries seems to be that of increasingly adapting their character to that of the technological tools of information management. Starting from this, the author wonders about the consequences for librarianship of the acquisition of the principles and procedures borrowed from other disciplines. Among these he includes those of social economics and of information science, identifying a risk of reductionism in the emphasis put on even one of these areas. Epistemology of the disciplines that are considered capable of providing a conceptual and methodological support to librarianship does not seem to completely confirm the nomos and telos of a library, or, that is to say, of that particular object that those disciplines should be able to circumscribe with their categories. They bring only necessary, but not sufficient, elements to the question of librarianship.
Faced with this risk, the essay proposes a return to the essence of the activity of a library and to rediscovering its fundamental interpretative value. Hermeneutics, inasmuch as it is a science of interpretation, and even more in its modern version of which a brief overview is provided, appears able to provide the necessary epistemological framework for reusing the principles of the aforesaid disciplines. It also appears able to build a standard librarianship story, respectful of the nomos and telos of a library.
In this way, the positive contributions of social economics and information science, which are declined as typical precomprehensions of librarianship, are recovered. The hermeneutic connection that binds a library to the relative social environment is also identified, while the partiality of deterministic interpretations of this bond is emphasized.

History and significance of copyright. Copyrightis a topical issue for today libraries and for al... more History and significance of copyright.
Copyrightis a topical issue for today libraries and for all the cultural industries stakeholders – from publishers to individual users. What legitimate use can you make of intellectual work? What kind of use restrictions can copyright holders establish? What’s the author’s property on his work? Today is difficult to give a clear answer to these and many other questions.
The paper analyses Chiara De Vecchis and Paolo Traniello’sbook (La proprietà del pensiero, 2012)investigating the copyright from an historical, theoretical and legal point of view – with the aim of contributing to the development of a culture of copyright which would take into consideration the reader's rights as well as the author’s rights, and would let librarians play their traditional role of mediators between works protected/promoted by intellectual property rights and patrons’ information needs, in a context that has extremely changed in the last decades.

On the future of the book. The second Unesco Forum on culture and cultural industries. To write,... more On the future of the book. The second Unesco Forum on culture and cultural industries.

To write, publish,read, preserve and lend a book are actions thatfive hundred years of printing have made habitual for everyone of us. All the same, we naturally recognize the several parts of the book industry: the publisher, the bookseller, the library etc. ICTs have considerably changed this context in a different way compared to what happened with other cultural products. The introduction of the MP3 format in music, forinstance, involved a change of support for an essentially identical product, whereas the digital book seems to imply a radical change of form too. An e-book cannot be called a book in the traditional sense of the word, as it can contain hypertext, multimedia and interactive elements that make it more similar to an oral storytelling rather than to a written text.
The book industry all over the world is deeply involved in this substantial change. Writing, publishing, selling and reading a book will never be the same, and the roles and places of the books' supply chain – the publisher, the bookseller, the library etc. – are changing quickly.
The second Unesco World Forum on culture and cultural industries (Monza, 6-8 June 2011) dealt with “The book tomorrow: the future of the written word”, and focused on three essential issues resulting from this new setting: the e-book economy, the future of copyright, and the function of the library in the digital environment. This paper presents some of the results of a wide discussion that involved major experts in the field, suggesting that – given the extent of the issues at stake – the future of the book has just began.

The essay takes its cue from some Italian contributions regarding the organization and management... more The essay takes its cue from some Italian contributions regarding the organization and management of some user-friendly librarian services and from the observation that the strategic objective of the majority of libraries seems to be that of increasingly adapting their character to that of the technological tools of information management. Starting from this, the author wonders about the consequences for librarianship of the acquisition of the principles and procedures borrowed from other disciplines. Among these he includes those of social economics and of information science, identifying a risk of reductionism in the emphasis put on even one of these areas. Epistemology of the disciplines that are considered capable of providing a conceptual and methodological support to librarianship does not seem to completely confirm the nomos and telos of a library, or, that is to say, of that particular object that those disciplines should be able to circumscribe with their categories. They bring only necessary, but not sufficient, elements to the question of librarianship.
Faced with this risk, the essay proposes a return to the essence of the activity of a library and to rediscovering its fundamental interpretative value. Hermeneutics, inasmuch as it is a science of interpretation, and even more in its modern version of which a brief overview is provided, appears able to provide the necessary epistemological framework for reusing the principles of the aforesaid disciplines. It also appears able to build a standard librarianship story, respectful of the nomos and telos of a library.
In this way, the positive contributions of social economics and information science, which are declined as typical precomprehensions of librarianship, are recovered. The hermeneutic connection that binds a library to the relative social environment is also identified, while the partiality of deterministic interpretations of this bond is emphasized.