Ordering the archive in early modern Venice (1400-1650)

The Republic of Venice was renowned for gathering and preserving from very early on a huge and growing archive. This article analyses the ways in which records were created, stored, and ordered for both immediate and future use. The political system of Venice, at once aristocratic and republican, had an important impact on the production and preservation of large quantities of documents in unbound filze and bound registri. In turn, the volume of this paperwork required the development of strict criteria for the organization of the material. In particular, this article analyses how records were divided at the moment of production, thus enabling a pragmatic combination of chronological and thematic ordering criteria. The latter were reinforced by finding tools arranged by subject matter, in particular indexes inside each volume and more general indexes across several volumes, both known as rubriche. The article suggests that indexing must be seen as a historical process dependent on Venice’s political structures and tied to specific moments in the wider history of the Republic, respectively in the fifteenth, early sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Finally, the article points to some unexpected interactions between political secrecy and indexing

How job and skill shortages affect the UK

Are we living in the "golden age" of cosmology? Are we close to understanding the nature of the unknown ingredients of the currently most accepted cosmological model and the physics of the early Universe? Or are we instead approaching a paradigm shift? What is dark matter and does it exist? How is it distributed around galaxies and clusters? Is the scientific community open to alternative ideas that may prompt a new scientific revolution - as the Copernican revolution did in Galileo's time? Do other types of supernovae exist that can be of interest for cosmology? Why have quasars never been effectively used as standard candles? Can you tell us about the scientific adventure of COBE? How does the extraction of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy depend on the subtraction of the various astrophysical foregrounds? These, among many others, are the astrophysical, philosophical and sociological questions surrounding modern cosmology and the scientific community that Mauro D'Onofrio and Carlo Burigana pose to some of the most prominent cosmologists of our time. Triggered by these questions and in the spirit of Galileo's book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" the roughly 40 interview partners reply in the form of essays, with a critical frankness not normally found in reviews, monographs or textbooks