Book Conservation and Digitization

Il fulcro di questo lavoro risiede proprio nella fruttuosa collaborazione tra studiosi e professionisti che operano per la conservazione e preservazione, da un lato, e fruizione dall’altro del manoscritto e del libro antico. ~Simona Turbanti, Umanistica Digitale, 10 (2021): 417-21

[D]ecades-long efforts to digitize rare books and manuscripts have provided humanities researchers with vast resources that have enabled virtual access and opportunities for research. The timely publication of a volume of essays edited by Alberto Campagnolo provides a veritable master class in the work required to make these digital assets readily accessible online to scholars around the world.

~Nancy K. Turner, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 357-61

Digital platforms that provide remote access to archives and library material are becoming the norm.[...] Anyone who has been involved in the planning and execution of a digitization project, large or small, knows it to be otherwise. Therefore, the publication of Campagnolo’s book is exceptionally timely. It is a welcome reference text for all staff in an archive or library and should be widely read by those planners and decision-makers before embarking on such a project.

~Zoë Reid, Archives and Records: The Journal of the Archives and Records Association 42, no. 3 (2021): 329-30

Campagnolo’s work usefully offers a necessary grounding in the history of digitization efforts, some of the major projects that have set the current stage, and suggestions for modes of collaboration among curators, conservationists, preservationists, and other stakeholders to guide the field into the future.[...]I hope this volume will become a standard reading for students embarking on careers in cultural heritage institutions and for those embarking on their own institutional digitization projects. Likewise, I hope book historians, manuscript scholars, and other users of digital databases will take the time to read this volume, as a better understanding of the technical challenges our field faces will allow us to collaborate more fully.

~Eric Ensley, Speculum 98, no. 1 (January 2023): 228-30