Developing and Managing the Brown University Library Collections
Graduate Program Reviews:  Italian Studies, 3 November 2000

The library collections for Italian Studies include an estimated 25,000 titles in language and literature, of which some 105 are currently received serials, all housed in the Rockefeller Library. These titles are supplemented by more than 5,000 titles in Italian history. Italian Studies also benefits from materials purchased for Political Science, Anthropology, Modern Culture & Media, History of Art & Architecture, Women's Studies, Comparative Literature, and other fields distributed over a range of classifications

The table below shows the expenditures for the past five years:

Expenditures in recent years have grown slightly, the decrease after 1996/97 being more a reflection of favorable exchange rates than any true decline in spending. We would probably be spending more but for personnel vacancies in the Library that caused less attention to be paid to Italian acquisitions in the past two years. Approval plans, which provide for the automatic receipt of the publishing output of most North American trade and university presses, provide only a small portion of the Italian studies material. Most of the books received via approvals are translations and secondary material in English.

The research interests of the Italian Studies faculty and graduate students are changing, becoming more interdisciplinary in nature. At the same time, the Department has decided to focus its attention mainly on the late medieval and early modern period, and on 20^th-century literature. The Library does have some particular strengths in both areas, though we are not as strong in the contemporary period. Traditional literature by "canonical" authors, found in the Rockefeller, is further supported by material found in special collections at the John Hay Library. One example is the Chambers Dante Collection, which consists of approximately 1,700 volumes, of scholarly editions of the 15th through the 19th century of Dante's works, commentaries, translations, and other reference, biographical, and historical works. We also have a unique collection in the Rockefeller Library acquired many years ago through a national cooperative project called the Farmington Plan. Through this plan we acquired some 6600 titles of contemporary Italian literature from about 1956 to 1971, but these had never been fully cataloged until recently. They are now in the online catalog, but not within the LC Classification, and they still housed in a non-public area and must be paged.

Together with the monograph collection, the serials holdings of the Library do not accurately reflect the increase of interest in film studies, critical theory, and contemporary literature and essays. Moreover, Italian output of electronic resources is now booming and is another area the Library has begun to collect. The Italian Studies faculty and the Library should review the list of serials we now receive, and make appropriate changes to reflect the current interests of the Department. Our current subscriptions to Italian studies serials have dropped from 123 to 105 since the last review, yet we have not cancelled any titles, so far as I know. The decrease is most likely the result of titles having ceased publication.

Overall, the Library collections have some strengths in Italian studies, especially in medieval and early modern literature. The interests of the graduate students, however, have ranged very widely in recent years, and our own collections have not been able to adequately support their research. They have relied heavily on Interlibrary Loan. The older Collection Development Policy that we have for Italian Studies calls for the development of research level collections across all of Italian literature. We certainly have not had the financial resources to do so. The more recent focus of their interests in both early and more recent literature should help us to better concentrate our resources, and to better fulfill their needs. I would encourage the Department to have its graduate students tell us of their needs as they develop their research proposals, so we can fill any gaps as needed.

In the past year, we have been able to appoint a new selector for Italian Studies, Barbara Sporer Filipac. She is on leave at the moment, however. When she returns, she can be reached at x39964 or: Barbara_Filipac@brown.edu 

Until then, please contact me with any questions or concerns (x32406): William_Monroe@brown.edu

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