On the edge of knowledge

Abstract

JLIS.it puts the organization of knowledge at the centre of its interests. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that the study of knowledge management processes as a whole best represents the focal point of our journal's scientific objectives. On the other hand, if we look at archival description as a complicated process of collecting, organizing and processing the information necessary to promote the knowledge and use of archival material, we recognise that it is a process of knowledge management and interpretation. Indeed, if we go beyond the perhaps somewhat breathless perimeters of a consolidated technical vocabulary, describing an archive means processing and transmitting codified information. This particular knowledge domain is also fed by data conveyed by increasingly changing objects such as documents and it is therefore as dynamic and multifaceted as its objects of study. Archival tools, in their typological and informative multiplicity, are in turn the most effective synthesis of archival work, especially when dealing with the world of historical archives. For these reasons it was deemed appropriate and useful to dedicate the present issue of JLIS.it to archival mediation as a peculiar form of knowledge management and to the tools through which it manifests itself. The essays making up the issue derive in almost all cases from the works of the AIDUSA conference Research on the border. Archival tools between production, dematerialization and continuity of use, held in Rome on 13 and 14 October 2022.