Re-reading Introduzione allo studio della biblioteconomia by Giovanni Solimine: reflections and perspectives for a new librarianship

Abstract

The article is dedicated to Giovanni Solimine’s Introduzione allo studio della biblioteconomia, a book published in 1995, articulated around the Library/Mediation/Organization model, which defined the foundations of a ‘library management’, rooted in the paradigmatic model of the reference library. The re-reading highlights the current complex factors of change, as well as the ongoing paradigm shift. Their ‘anomalies’, in Thomas Kuhn’s lexicon, manifest themselves in the heterogeneous library models outlined, from the ‘digital’ to the ‘social’ and later ‘participatory’ one. The closing considerations point to the need to enhance the energies and intelligence that move in the fields of the disciplines of library, information and documentation cultures, directing them towards a critical assessment of the change taking place, whose rooting must be traced in the deep invariants on which the tradition of the field has been established through time.