Titles, columns, news: the description of the contents of the journals, between repertory deficiencies and superficial cataloging

Abstract

Descriptions of ancient and old periodicals (approximately printed by 20th century) in biblioghaphies and catalogues often provides few information about the structure and the content. It is a paradox, considering the bibliographic complexity and the importance of the periodicals as a historical source. Contents are often described indirectly, only paying attention to the transcription (also incomplete) of titles; but – many times – this is not enough to give evidence to all colums and topics. This situation has been explained through the analysis of bibliographic news and reviews spread by Italian periodicals from 18th to 19th century; as a matter of fact, this content is known only through rare examples of very detailed biblioghaphies, specialized studies or, clearly, reading the periodicals itself. The regular creation of biblioghaphies provided with key-words about contents could be a solution to this problem. These analytic biblioghaphies would be really useful if they were linked to the library catalogues (nowdays increasingly hypertextual and dynamic); the perfect outlook would be matching them to further links to historic periodicals in digital formats. In this way could be avoided that the direct access to digitized periodicals and the full-text research among articles and news promote the spread of disorganised, unaware and passive research methods. It would also be possible to save time avoiding to make researches on periodical not relevant about your own topic (in this case the contents are about bibliography).