Library And Ancient Collection
The spaces of the academy
The Library
Consisting of printed works acquired since its foundation—among which, for their importance, the Reports, Memoirs, and Annals stand out—it represents one of the oldest and most important national book heritages dealing with the different aspects of agriculture, with a collection of approximately 15,000 volumes, including over 500 ancient books published up to 1830, and more than 300 ancient and modern periodicals.
Within it, the Ancient Collection is made up of 6 sixteenth-century books (Cinquecentine), 1 of which consists of three volumes, and 477 ancient books and articles in multiple volumes, featuring prominent authors such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, Pier Crescenzi, Filippo Re, and Louis Pasteur.
Today, the library is connected to the Library Portal of the University of Bologna and the National Library Service.
The entire book heritage is preserved in suitable traditional and compactable structures that adequately protect the volumes while making them accessible to the public.
Library Services
The spaces of the academy
The Ancient Collection
In library science, all books published up to 1830 are considered ancient. This limit is determined by bibliological reasons. This is, of course, a conventional distinction determined by material reasons such as the quality of the paper, which was still handmade, and the predominance of printing with artisanal movable type.
These are pre-industrial mechanical processes that were replaced during the 19th and then 20th centuries by industrial printing. Added to these reasons is the different location of cataloging data within the book.
Therefore, incunabula, sixteenth-century books (cinquecentine), and all works printed from the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the first three decades of the 19th century are considered ancient books. The Ancient Collection of the National Academy of Agriculture is made up of 6 Cinquecentine, 1 of which consists of three volumes, and 477 ancient books, several of which consist of multiple volumes.
The collection was gradually formed over the more than two hundred years of the Academy's life thanks to donations and purchases on the antiquarian market. The topics covered by these ancient prints concern agriculture and animal husbandry, but specific groups of volumes dedicated to water regulation in the Po basin and issues related to land reclamation can also be retrieved.
There is also a bundle of prints focusing on old and new food and industrial crops, enology, the extraction of sugar cultivation, the production of dye substances, breeding, and phytopathology. Notable is the corpus formed by the publications of Filippo Re and other illustrious academicians, which naturally settled on the shelves of the Academy's wooden library.
This important library deposit was studied and described by Andrea Risi in 2002. The catalog titled The Ancient Collection of the Library of the National Academy of Agriculture, whose introduction is referred to here, allows for a deep and comprehensive understanding of the Ancient Collection of the National Academy of Agriculture.
