New edition of the Guida al sistema italiano di indicizzazione per soggetto

Abstract

This contribution reproduces the text of the speech that was held in the framework of the presentation of the second edition of the volume Nuovo soggettario. Guida al sistema italiano di indicizzazione per soggetto, that took place in Florence on June 7th, 2022. As happened in these years with the subject indexing tools of important national libraries, the National Central Library of Florence, too, has updated the Nuovo soggettario, that saw the light in 2007, today employed by the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) and by most libraries of the National Library System (SBN). The intervention recalls the context factors that led to the project and to the elaboration of the second edition of the Guida, fully revised and updated: the evolution of the international scene related to indexing (new standards, new conceptual models), the semantic web and the linked open data; the development of the Nuovo soggettario system as a whole (increase of terminology, connections with equivalents in other languages, with resources of archives and museums, availability of the Thesaurus in exchange formats and standard protocols, etc.). The second edition’s novelties are then illustrated: a better organized exposure of the standards, more functional to their use, a totally new first part dedicated to the principles and to the general aspects of the indexing, the confrontation with IFLA LRM, the references to the indexing of non-bibliographical resources (figurative works, photographs) of ancient works, etc. Finally, it ends by stressing the importance that the cooperation with other partner institutions and with ICCU has had in this work, and shall continue to have in the future, for a greater and greater sharing of the semantic data on behalf of the Italian libraries.