Catalogues

Photo credits: La Statale Immagini

The Italy ELT Archive is a database hosted on WordPress integrated with Tainacan, an open-source plug-in used for creating and disseminating digital collections.
The Italy ELT Archive combines three open access catalogues:
Books: a catalogue of bibliographic entries describing the primary sources housed in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan, as well as other sources which can be consulted in Italian libraries.
Authors: a catalogue comprising all the authors of the primary sources in the Books catalogue, which acknowledges their fundamental contribution to popularising “ELT principles and ideas through their works” (Nava & Pedrazzini 2019, 307).
Publishers: a catalogue of the publishing houses which produced and distributed the primary sources in the Books catalogue.

The Books catalogues is the core component of the Italy ELT Archive. The primary sources here collected are sampled according to

Time frame: 20th Century;
Target learners: Italian native speakers;
Learning contexts: primary and secondary school, vocational training, higher education, self-study;
Type of materials/ Genres: course books, pedagogic grammars, readers, conversation books, self-study books.

The Italy ELT Archive aims to provide a representative rather than exhaustive representation of learning and teaching materials for 20th Century Italian learners of English. The inclusion of the primary sources in the database depends on

Type of materials/ Genres exemplified by the primary sources themselves
Spread and success of the materials, based on sales information provided by the publishers (when available)
Number of editions/reprints of the materials, based on information accessible via the On-line Public Access Catalogue of the National Library Service (OPAC SBN)

The three catalogues can be browsed by typing keywords in the search box placed on the left, just below the catalogue logo. An interface for advanced search is also available, which combines search boxes corresponding to different search criteria.

For a more refined search, a series of filters can be applied, which are based to the metadata used for designing the entries (faceted search).

The search results/filtered items can be downloaded by clicking on the “View as…” button displayed on the right-hand side of the catalogue header image. The formats available for download are
Tainacan API
HTML
CSV
Simple JSON

How to filter the catalogues (faceted search)

The Books catalogue can be filtered by

Author (search box)
Type of author (check box list)
Author’s country of origin (check box list)
Publisher (search box)
Place of publication (numeric interval)
Year of publication (check box list)
Type of material (check box list)
Proficiency level (check box list)
Target learners’ age (check box list)
Teaching/learning context (check box list)
Method/approach (check box)
Teacher’s book (select box: you can select or exclude items that were complemented by a teacher’s book)
Supplementary materials (check box list: you can select or exclude items which were published alongside a workbook, audiocassettes, etc.)
Visuals (check box list: you can select or exclude items depending on the type of visual contents they feature)
Is the book stored in the physical Italy ELT Archive? (select box: you can find out which books are housed in our physical archive in Milan)

The metadata regarding the proficiency level, the target learners’ age, the teaching/learning context, and the method/approach refer to information that emerges from the title of the sources, the preface/introduction (when available), the back cover, as well as from insights obtained by closely investigating the contents of the sources themselves.
The bibliographic entries also include

• a link to the OPAC SBN bibliographic record which allows users to locate the book in Italian libraries
• a short description providing more information about the design of the materials sampled, focusing on the approach/methodology they implement.

Any piece of information which may be missing (e.g. edition number) is marked as N/A (not available).

The Authors catalogue can be filtered by
Country of origin (checkbox list)
Type of author (checkbox list to filter the Authors depending on their professional background)
Some of the Authors’ entries are complemented by a short biography.
Although extensive research has been conducted to provide as many details as possible regarding the Authors included in the Archive, for some of them information is incomplete or not available (N/A).

The Publishers catalogue can be filtered by their headquarters location (search box where you can type the name of a city or a country). The entries include a description of the Publisher, also from a historical point of view, and they provide a URL to its current website (if still active). In the case of Publishers having an archive or historical library, additional information in that regard is given.