Review: Anna Bilotta. 2026. Al confine tra biblioteconomia e digital humanities. Contesti, confronti e sviluppi interdisciplinari. Milano: Ledizioni

Abstract

Anna Bilotta’s Al confine tra biblioteconomia e digital humanities. Contesti, confronti e sviluppi interdisciplinari (Ledizioni, 2026) owes its originality to a design that applies the comparative method not to library practices or digital projects, but to the disciplinary identities of library science and digital humanities themselves. The enquiry spans theoretical genealogies, academic training, institutional recognition in Italian scientific sectors, lexicometric and thematic analysis of key journals, and a qualitative investigation through a round table and interviews. The result is a significant contribution to debates on “documentary cultures” and a marked methodological coherence — notably in chapter V, which uses digital humanities text-analysis tools to study the disciplines themselves — alongside several questions the volume leaves open: the GLAM paradigm acknowledged but not adopted as a systematic framework, the undeveloped implications of generative artificial intelligence for documentary mediation, and the asymmetry of a comparison conducted, by necessity, more from the library science vantage point than from that of digital humanities.