Giuseppe Fumagalli’s <em>Raccolta bibliografica della guerra delle nazioni</em> and its classification

Abstract

During World War One Giuseppe Fumagalli – director of the University Library of Bologna – not only fostered the local committee that provided books for the soldiers who were fighting at the battlefront, but also started a huge bibliographical collection about the war, gathering different kind of publications from many different countries: volumes, periodicals, pamphlets, reports of associations and departments, music texts, posters, leaflets, cards, etc.
His purpose was to provide documentary evidence of the conflict from any point of view. In order to manage this rich collection, Fumagalli conceived a specific systematical and hierarchical classification organized in ten classes, each of them divided in subclasses, and innumerable subjects: at the time of the war ending there were almost 940 entries. Offering a unique overview of World War One, the relevance of the Schema della classificazione created by Fumagalli goes far beyond Library science.