CRIC (Coordinamento delle riviste italiane di cultura) and Casalini Libri, united by a shared mission to enhance the visibility and international presence of Italian culture, collaborate to bring libraries and institutions closer to the vibrant exchange of ideas taking place within the world of cultural journals.
A cornerstone of this partnership is the joint effort to distribute CRIC-affiliated journals in digital format via Casalini Libri's Torrossa platform, which currently hosts publications from over 580 academic publishers specializing in the humanities and social sciences, serving scholars and researchers worldwide.
CRIC's participation in the Torrossa Digital Library and Digital Bookshop project dates back nearly twenty years, when electronic publishing was still in its infancy within the humanities sector.
With the support and collaboration of EUI and CLIR, Casalini Libri and Charleston Hub will celebrate the 25th edition of the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat series in Fiesole, Italy, from 7-9 April 2025, hosted by the European University Institute. Join us as we build upon our collective foundations and move towards the next 25 years in a climate of dialogue, participation and partnership, identifying shared strategies to pave the way for a sustainable, multifarious and equitable future in the ever-changing landscape of higher education.
Torrossa is delighted to confirm its compliance with the new COUNTER 5 standard for e-book user statistics and to strengthen its relationship with the LIA Foundation for Accessible Italian Books.
As part of its commitment to providing a first-class resource for libraries, Torrossa's infrastructure is constantly updated to keep pace with technological advancements and ensure compliance with international standards and protocols.
As part of its commitment to providing a first-class resource for libraries, Torrossa's infrastructure is constantly updated to keep pace with technological advancements and ensurecompliance with international standards and protocols.
Casalini Libri, Erasmus Antiquariaat en Boekhandel and @Cult pledge their continued commitment to libraries, accompanying traditional, core services with investment in new, flexible and sustainable ways of providing access to academic publishing from all over the world.
Leading providers of publications, bibliographic data and knowledge management solutions, together we focus on providing the best possible services to libraries, steered solely by our long-standing and close ties with the international library community and in line with their evolving needs.
Casalini Libri is delighted to announce that it has become a member of the LIA Foundation for Accessible Italian Books. Through membership of the foundation, Casalini Libri confirms and intensifies its support for Fondazione LIA's activities and projects and its dedication to promoting the culture of accessibility. This step 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 already brought significant results, achieving compliance with international accessibility standards well before the coming introduction, on 28th June 2025, of the new European legislation for accessibility. Casalini Libri, today, works towards the key objectives of expanding its catalogue of accessible content and improving user experience, specifically for the navigation of its platform and the reading of texts in digital formats. Torrossa currently hosts e-books and e-journals from over 580 publishers worldwide. The catalogue is constantly augmented with publications and to date counts more than 1 million digital texts. Fondazione LIA has been working for over 10 years to support publishers in the process of creating accessible digital publications and collaborates with all those involved in the publishing chain to make the experience of choosing, purchasing and reading books accessible for all readers.
Torrossa and Brepols are pleased to announce their new collaboration which brings many of the publisher's most recent publications to the Torrossa Digital Library and Bookstore. The e-books are available both for institutional purchase by libraries and research institutes, and for purchase by individuals for personal use. Over 800 e-books have already been added to the Torrossa catalogue, all published between 2017 and 2023 and covering a range of subjects, from linguistics and literature to history, theology and social sciences. Further additions will be made to the catalogue in the future, as new publications are released in digital format.
Working together, we can enhance catalogues, improve the visibility of collections and provide a better user experience for patrons.
Libraries, archives and museums hold a vast quantity of data and resources that, until now, have often remained hidden from sight in catalogues and archives. By implementing the BIBFRAME data model and facilitating the interoperability with IFLA LRM and other widely used ontologies, bibliographic information can be transformed into Linked Data, revealing it to a wider audience and encouraging greater engagement with library, archive and museum collections.
Visit the renewed Share Family website at www.share-family.org to discover how to get involved.
Casalini Libri and AtCult are pleased to announce their participation in two important discussions on the subject of Linked Data as part of the 2023 meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago.
The Share-VDE Workshop, scheduled for the morning of Monday 26th June, will provide an overview of the Share Family and Virtual Discovery Environment, discussing the advantages of a collaborative approach to linked data and knowledge sharing, showcasing recent advancements in infrastructure, interoperability and tools, and presenting progress reports from its working groups, members of the Share Family who play an active and collaborative role in defining the direction of developments through a constant exchange of ideas and principles that benefit the entire Share community.
We are also delighted to participate as contributors at the Library of Congress BIBFRAME Update, due to take place at 1pm (ET) on Monday 26th June. Tiziana Possemato will address the meeting on the benefits of adopting the BIBFRAME-based entity environment from different perspectives, as she discusses Catering for consortia in the BIBFRAME environment: case histories from the Share Family.
The Roman Union of Ecclesiastical Libraries (URBE) and @CULT announce the release of PARSIFAL, a linked data management system and entity discovery platform designed to facilitate the exchange and interoperability of bibliographic data, increasing the visibility of, and access to, their resources.
PARSIFAL responds to the need identified by the Rectors of the Roman Pontifical Universities to equip their institutions' libraries with a highly innovative search engine, bringing together bibliographic data and authority items from the 17 participating URBE libraries of URBE in a dedicated portal that provides a single point of access to the libraries' vast patrimony of resources: the portal counts 2.8 million records to date, and is updated weekly, allowing users to benefit from a streamlined, efficient, research experience, with results enriched by sources from individual catalogues.
Casalini Libri and EDRLab release the new Torrossa Reader application, based on Readium LCP technology, to facilitate the consultation of texts in EPUB format available on the Torrossa platform.
The result of ongoing collaboration between Casalini Libri and EDRLab, the new app from Torrossa has been developed using using Readium technologies, particularly Readium LCP, a simple but reliable solution for distributing protected content from EDRLab that supports different business models.
Secure, accessible and easy to use, the app guarantees efficient content protection for publishers, while offering enhanced consultation with personalisable settings for end-users and responding to the requirement for ebook accessibility that is part of the EU Accessibility Directive, coming in force in 2025.
Following the announcement in 2021 of the collaboration between Casalini Libri and the LIA Foundation for Accessible Italian Books, we are now delighted to report that the Torrossa web platform has been made accessibile, in conformity with internationally recognized requirements for rendering Web content and reading solutions as accessible as possible for people with disabilities.
Torrossa is compatible with the most recent versions of principal browsers and screen readers; in addition, Casalini Libri is also working to implement a new content reader, based on an open-source solution of the Readium LCP, to further facilitate accessible reading for e-content. An additional objective is to make it possible for alternative descriptions of the images in the titles to be read in line with the text, using the screen-reader.
More than 100 new publishers joined the platform in 2021, delivering a 400% increase in the academic content on offer to institutions.
Casalini Libri and Erasmus Boekhandel are delighted to announce the success of the first phase of their joint investment to amplify and strengthen the coverage of publishing from across Europe in the Torrossa digital library.
In the first year of this investment, the digital library has expanded fourfold, with a substantial part of the growth coming from independent publishers and international groups publishing in English and French languages, as well as a significant increase in full-text content from Italian and Spanish publishers, traditionally at the core of the library's digital collections.
Casalini Libri and @Cult announce the release of the Share-VDE 2.0 linked data management system and entity discovery platform, a pioneering and effective environment that uses linked data to connect and present authoritative data from a growing network of libraries. Share-VDE 2.0 aims to facilitate the exchange and reuse of bibliographic data, at the same time increasing the visibility of and enabling wider access to knowledge.
A collaborative effort, initially undertaken as a research & development project, in 2016 Share-VDE has evolved to become both a real and effective pilot environment influenced by the vision of the LD4P initiatives for the practical application of Linked Open Data for the LAM domain, and progressively an authoritative linked data node. By implementing the BIBFRAME data model and incorporating Share-VDE adaptations, Share-VDE enriches, reconciles, clusterizes and converts the authority and bibliographic MARC data of participant libraries in a dynamic, discoverable format, providing a reliable and up-to-date source of data complete with a set of advanced tools and services that also facilitate interoperability with IFLA LRM.
The explanation of position of Share-VDE is outlined in the Share-VDE Statement.
Casalini Libri has opened a new sales and distribution channel for academic content in e-book format, making texts available in Torrossa with the specific aim of supporting distance learning.
We have always believed in digital innovation as a complementary format to paper; now, more than ever, we are convinced that the digital format can assist in allowing publications to be accessed by all those who need them to carry out study and research.
Over forty publishers have already joined the initiative and more are expected to pledge their participation during this year. Valuable, constructive and ongoing collaboration with institutions in identifying the titles of greatest interest means that Torrossa is continually enriched with new content.
True to its mission to support the dissemination of culture, Casalini Libri has, through the years, provided increasingly advanced tools to facilitate access to academic research and cultural content for scholars from all over the world. Since the early 2000s its Digital Division and Torrossa platform have offered libraries and institutions the possibility to consult academic texts in the Humanities and Social Sciences in digital format.
In the context of the overall renewal of our technological infrastructure, Casalini Libri has recently embarked on an important collaboration with the LIA Foundation for Accessible Italian Books in order to achieve and ensure full compliancy with the European Accessibility Act when it comes into force in 2025.
Casalini Libri web developers and programmers have already begun specialised training with the LIA team of accessible publishing and assistive technologies in order to adapt the Torrossa platform to conform with accessibility standards by the end of 2021, referring to internationally recognized requirements for rendering Web content and reading solutions as accessible as possible.
Casalini Libri and Erasmus Boekhandel welcome prestigious international publishers to the Torrossa Digital Library, enhancing its catalogue with high quality French and English language digital content.
Well known as an important source for digital publications in the Humanities and Social Science from Italy and the Vatican City, Spain and Portugal, Torrossa now considerably extends its coverage. A result of the recently established collaboration and increasingly fruitful synergy between Casalini Libri and Erasmus Boekhandel, new agreements have been defined with several prominent publishers from France, the Netherlands, the UK, United States and further afield.
Over twenty imprints join more than 300 publishers already hosted on the platform, with in excess of 20,000 e-books added to the catalogue in the first few months of collaboration and yet more to come.
Casalini Libri joins forces with its historic partner @Cult, a software house based in Rome and specializing in the design and development of solutions for information management and knowledge sharing. The union both strengthens and furthers the Casalini mission to promote the dissemination of culture through increasingly advanced services to libraries, institutions and publishers.
Aware of the changes required by digital transformation and committed to providing solutions, @Cult responds perfectly to the operational needs of the new Casalini - Erasmus - Houtschild group. It is therefore natural that it should become the new centre for research and development within the company, at the same time guaranteeing maximum autonomy and enhancing professional skills, to the benefit of all those who work and collaborate with Casalini Libri.
Torrossa Digital Library receives a newly restyled and enhanced interface as part of an ongoing investment in technological innovation and improving user experience.The new look and improved digital library aims to provide the best possible tools and user experience to all our collaborators, customers and library patrons.
As we all continue to deal with this particularly challenging situation, we would like to share a moment of positivity with some exciting news. Casalini Libri has acquired, along with Mr. Dirk Raes, the Dutch based companies Erasmus Antiquariaat en Boekhandel (with offices in Amsterdam and Paris) and Houtschild Internationale Boekhandel.
In tandem with Casalini Libri and @Cult, the Penn Libraries is developing an experimental system based on the Share-Virtual Discovery Environment (Share-VDE) project which will be available in mid 2020.
It is with both enormous pride and great pleasure that our CEO, Michele Casalini, has accepted from the University of Florence an honorary degree celebrating his dedication and contribution to the field of Library and Information Science.
True to our mission of investing in technological innovation to provide the best possible services to libraries and publishers, we have recently begun a significant undertaking to upgrade and improve access to the electronic resources available on Torrossa. A renewed and reystyled platform, in turn, allows us to further enhance the range of content available in our digital library and bookstore.
As one of the major bibliographic agencies for data regarding European publications, Casalini Libri is particularly interested in Linked Data and the opportunities that this method of publishing structured data provides for widening the dissemination and increasing the discoverability of bibliographic data.In recent years we have been an active participant in discussions on Linked Data, metadata standards and BIBFRAME both in the US and Europe.
On March 1, 2017 Casalini Libri became an ISNI Registration Agency, with the scope to contribute data to the central ISNI database, provide ISNI related services to organisations and users in the information chain, as well as to support data enrichment and procedures for the reconciliation of entities.
We are pleased to announce that Shibboleth is now available on the Torrossa platform, widening the range of access options to the platform for libraries and their users. Shibboleth is among the world's most widely deployed federated identity solutions, connecting users to applications both within and between organisations. It provides Single Sign-On capabilities and allows sites to make informed authorisation decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.