italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear Prof. Ferzoco, dear colleagues,
I would like to add something to my brief e-mail about the controversy of
the last few days.
How many subscribers has this mailing list? I just take 1000 as plausible,
at least as a reasonable target. If everyone would send just three
announcements a year of his/her books, essays, reviews, we would receive
more than eight e-mails a day (Easter and Christmas included), not counting
all the others we normally receive.
This could not be a problem: we subscribed the list and we are expected to
receive many e-mails. If we don't like it, we could just unsubscribe.
Since "good taste" is something very personal, it does not look like a very
good criterion.
The point is another one: the amount of bibliography is becoming more and
more difficult to manage.
The idea that everyone of us should feed on books is certainly right and
even poetic. Nonetheless, from a strictly professional point of view I must
admit that I struggle so much to read not everything, but simply as much as
I can in my research field (the Middle Ages), that I must give up all the
rest.
I personally think that a real challenge we are facing is to develop
suitable devices to rationalize this huge amount of publications
(fortunately, some of them already exist, both on line and on paper).
Moreover, I perfectly understand and share the need to promote everyone's
own work; I even agree that promotion is essential to everybody to know what
the others are doing. But I personally do not think that this mailing-list
could be the right place to do that.
For instance, I think that a website such as www.academia.edu could be a
brilliant and nice solution to this side of the problem.
With my best regards and wishes,
Anna Pegoretti
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