The Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series was established in 1999 as an informal meeting of leading library and information industry professionals. Rooted in an idea shared by Mario Casalini, together with Rebecca Lenzini and Katina Strauch, the conference took shape around their common desire to stimulate dialogue and collaboration across the scholarly communication sector, cementing over the years its reputation as unique opportunity to interact with leading library and information industry professionals in a relaxed and thoughtful setting.

A collaboration between Casalini Libri and the Charleston Hub, in recent years also in liaison with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the conference continues to attract the participation of many industry leaders - publishers, librarians and vendors alike - who join us in different locations each year to contribute to the discussion on the future of libraries, collections, and the scholarly information chain as a whole.

The Torrossa Retreat was first established in 2013 with the intention of creating an opportunity for discussion, updates and exchange on the expectation and trends of the national and international academic publishing market in the digital age. The Torrossa Retreat brings together publishers and libraries to share experiences, ideas and opinions with colleagues and other professionals. Together, we aim to identify shared strategies, to enhance usability and to promote the acquisition of scholarly and cultural publishing by academic institutions and sales to readers around the world.

Visit www.torrossaretreat.org to consult some of the topics we have addressed so far and for updates on future meetings.

We are proud to have sponsored and supported the series of Magisterial Lessons in Library Science held annually by the University of Florence between 2008 and 2024. Attracting international experts and highly respected library professionals as speakers, the magisterial lessons explored important contemporary questions in the field. All proceedings from these lessons through the years, published in English and Italian bilingual editions by Casalini Libri, are available in open access through our Torrossa Open portal.

Continuing conversations begun at the New Directions Symposium held in Frankfurt in October 2017, we were delighted to participate in a series of virtual presentations/discussions held between 11th January and 19th April 2021, focussing on three main areas: new models for collaborative collection development and services, the challenges of the growing range of content and format types, and the evolving role of libraries and librarians in the research process.

This working forum on the future of Western European collections and librarianship is an ongoing project sponsored by the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL) and the German-North American Resources Partnership (GNARP), both working projects of the Center for Research Libraries (Chicago, USA).

• AALL - American Association of Law Libraries
• AIB - Associazione Italiana Biblioteche
• AIE - Associazione Italiana Editori
• ALA - American Library Association
• ALCTS - Association for Library Collections & Technical Services
• ARLIS - Art Libraries Society of North America
• ATLA - American Theological Library Association
• BISG - Book Industry Study Group
• CLIR - Council on Library and Information Resources
• COUNTER - Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources
• CRIC - Coordinamento Riviste Italiane di Cultura
• EDItEUR - International Standards
• EURIG - European RDA Interest Group
• ISLG - Italian Studies Library Group
• ISNI - International Standard Name Identifier
• LIBER - Europe's Research Library Network
• LODLAM - Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums
• MLA - Music Library Association
• Open Athens - Remote Access resource hub
• SALALM - Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials
• SSP - Society for Scholarly Publishing
• UKSG - United Kingdom Serials Group

Acting as a bibliographic agency has been the backbone of Casalini Libri from the beginning, producing original cataloguing and authority entries to international standards and collaborating with the library community in the development and application of new approaches to traditional cataloguing environments. In the 1980s, we moved from paper cards to MARC and computerized transfers, and later introduced our websites, allowing libraries to access and integrate our database directly into their workflows. Now we are involved in yet another evolution, with the aim of further facilitating and opening up access to bibliographic data, enabling a new level of international cooperation.

Remaining faithful to our original mission of providing the top-level bibliographic output required by our customers, we successfully implemented RDA (Resource Description and Access) in 2013 and have been active contributors to the translation of the standard into Italian.

We are driven by the determination to anticipate the changing needs of the market and are currently working on the development of solutions to the newest aspects of cataloguing: Linked Data and the BIBFRAME data model. Initiated by the Library of Congress, BIBFRAME provides a foundation for the future of bibliographic description, both on the web, and in the broader networked world that is grounded in Linked Data techniques. This video, from the Library of Congress, discusses the progress that is being made and how we, at Casalini Libri, are contributing.

Our dedication to this field has led to a number of important partnerships and projects and has been recognised at the highest level. On 21st May 2019 it was with both enormous pride and great pleasure that our CEO, Michele Casalini, accepted from the University of Florence an honorary degree celebrating his dedication and contribution to the field of Library and Information Science, the very first bestowal of the honour in question for merit in modern librarianship by an Italian university and only the second time that a similar distinction has been conferred in Library and Information Science in Italy.

The Share Family enables libraries to connect information, collaborate as community, and make knowledge more visible in a way that is cooperative, sustainable, open, inclusive and dynamic.

Since 2016 we have been an active partner to libraries in discussing and discovering the possibilities presented by the structure of the semantic web and in implementing new cataloguing practices that make it possible for bibliographical data to be structured as linked data, so that it can be easily found, used, shared and reused on the world wide web. Our very first project was in collaboration with a group of university libraries in the South of Italy, adapting workflows to web standards and creating a shared catalogue with collective tools.

Key partners to an international community of libraries, with the Share Family we have taken the leap from theory to reality, putting into practice tools for the conversion of MARC data and for the publication, discovery and management of bibliographic Linked Open Data.

The Share Family now counts libraries from across Europe, North America and Asia and includes shared discovery environments that are specifically designed and dedicated to groups of libraries with common profiles and interests. To name a few: 

• Share-VDE connects the catalogues of university and national libraries
• British National Bibliography, the first to use an environment dedicated to national bibliographies
• PARSIFAL shared platform and tools developed specifically for URBE
• Open pool of PCC-quality BIBFRAME data

The essence of this partnership and its strength is that members of the Share Family are partners and active collaborators, guiding and participating in defining and developing the tools that they will be using.

• Time, expertise and costs are shared across the community for the benefit of all members.
• Collective tools allow data to be edited, validated and enriched with additional information.
• Open discovery interfaces provide access to shared data for the entire research community.

To learn more, watch our series of short videos or visit the Share-Family website.

As Casalini Libri, we contribute to, and advocate for the Share family. We also work closely with the wider library community and liaise with organizations such as IFLA and LD4P to exchange knowledge and find solutions that allow for integration with parallel or interoperable systems. The technology behind the Share Family is provided by @Cult, the software house behind the original concept and the successive development of the Share family. We formally joined forces, with @Cult becoming part of the Casalini Libri Group, in 2020 so that we could provide an even more integrated approach to our efforts.

Since 2017 we have been active contributors and sponsors of the BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe, a forum for sharing knowledge about the practice of, production with, and planning of BIBFRAME implementation. Together with an international organising committee, we are instrumental in enabling and promoting the conference. Since 2024, our CEO, Michele Casalini, is spokesperson for the event.

The annual meeting brings together professionals working in the transition from MARC to Linked Data using the BIBFRAME model and related tools. The areas covered by the Workshop are strongly focused on the practical implementation of BIBFRAME, rather than being a theoretical Linked Data/Semantic Web event.

We contribute new authority records to the Library of Congress authority file, as well as making subject and classification proposals through participation in the NACO and SACO programs of the Program for Cooperative Cataloguing (PCC).

More recently, we have welcomed the PCC into the Share Family of libraries, creating an open pool of PCC-quality BIBFRAME data.

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) seeks to be a democratic and diverse organization whose mission and goals are determined by its membership. Members govern the programs through participation in program events, standing committees, and task groups. PCC is a cooperative cataloging venture wherein members contribute bibliographic records and related data under a common set of standards and conventions using the bibliographic utilities.

As an ISNI Registration Agency, we contribute data to the central ISNI database, provide ISNI related services to organisations and users in the information chain, and support data enrichment and procedures for the reconciliation of entities.

Our involvement in the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME), detailed attention to authority and identifier management, and activities in the field of linked data demonstrate our shared goals with ISNI.

ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier, ISO 27729) is the globally recognised and adopted standard for the unique identification of the public identities across all fields of creative activity, in use by numerous libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management organizations around the world. The mission of the ISNI International Authority (ISNI-IA) is to assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer, artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying number and diffuse each assigned ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described.

As aggregator and provider of original-language digital academic publishing, we are particularly interested in the efforts of EDRLab to contribute to an open-source and user-friendly ebook ecosystem that handles the expectations of all involved, from authors and publishers to libraries and patrons. A member of EDRLab since the beginning of 2020, we have adopted the Readium LCP DRM for our Torrossa digital library, with the aim of making the digital content we host even more accessible for students, researchers and scholars.

Luisa Gaggini, Head of our Digital Division, was elected to the EDRLab Board of Directors in June 2023 with a two-year mandate.

EDRLab is an international, non-profit development laboratory, working on the deployment of an open, interoperable and accessible digital publishing ecosystem in Europe.

At Casalini Libri our mission has always been to support and further the dissemination of culture. We consider it essential to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to use Torrossa for study and research and have made it our priority to make Torrossa accessible to blind, visually impaired and dyslexic users.

Our Torrossa platform for digital content was made fully accessible in 2022 and conforms with internationally recognized requirements for rendering Web content and reading solutions as accessible as possible for people with disabilities. We continue to work towards extending the level of accessibility of the publications distributed through Torrossa and to provide ever more sophisticated tools and aids for the consultation of texts online.

Joining the Foundation as a member in 2025, Casalini Libri confirms and intensifies its support for Fondazione LIA's activities and projects and its dedication to promoting the culture of accessibility.

Our membership of Fondazione LIA is the culmination of a long-standing and rewarding collaboration which began with the audit of the Torrossa digital publishing distribution platform in 2021 and which has brought significant results, achieving compliance with international accessibility standards. Working side by side, we commit to strengthening synergy with publishers towards the objective of publishing new digital content in a natively accessible format and actively contributing to the creation of an accessible digital publishing ecosystem.

Fondazione LIA carries out research and development activities in the field of digital accessibility, promotes a culture of accessibility in the publishing field and is part of an international network of organizations dealing with accessibility of contents. Fondazione LIA is a non-profit-making organization created by the Italian Publishers’ Association (AIE - Associazione Italiana Editori), together with the Italian Union of the Blind and Partially Sighted (UICI - Unione Italiana dei Ciechi e degli Ipovedenti).

TorrossaOpen, part of the Torrossa digital library, is designed specifically to contribute to the dissemination of research content from Southern Europe in Open Access and is testimony to our mission to diffuse European scholarly culture worldwide.

The repository is an important point of reference and essential resource for

• publishers wishing to publish research in open access, particularly in the fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences
• researchers wishing to make their work available and visible internationally
• students, scholars and library patrons, who benefit from Torrossa's additional study support tools• libraries and research centres that already have access to digital content through Torrossa
• international databases and Discoveries Services, who find in TorrossaOpen a reliable partner for the timely and up-to-date supply of metadata

A number of additional functions and services, developed specifically for use within research institutions, include quality metadata, searching within the full text, integration with Discovery Services, long-term preservation in archives such as CLOCKSS and Portico, indexing in Google Scholar, MARC records, COUNTER statistics and a personal user workspace for the creation of bibliographies, compatible with leading citations.