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The purpose of this paper is to explore the level of e‐government adoption in small Italian municipalities, in coherence with the action plans suggested by the main National Institution on the subject.

The following setting is used: of 8,101 Italian municipalities, the majority (72 per cent) represent small municipalities accounting for 10,590,728 inhabitants out of a total of 58,571,711 nationally. Adopting an empirical approach, a survey was conducted on 49 small municipalities, through a questionnaire and in‐depth interviews with political and managerial decision makers and IT officers.

The survey suggests some technical reasons concerning a lack of infrastructure and IT services (e.g. back‐up, security, disaster recovery) and some managerial reasons related both to a lack of strategic vision of information needs and to an inadequacy of requested skills and competencies.

The research reported here is based only on a survey of 49 small municipalities located in a single area. The findings may lead to further research on a large sample of municipalities located in several geographic areas.

The findings imply that small municipalities will have to redefine their programme priorities to respond to a new IT context.

In spite of the efforts by both Government and the EU, the qualitative‐quantitative results show that the adoption of e‐government has not progressed in small Italian municipalities.

Contemporary debate is increasingly focused on ICT and sustainability, especially in relation to the modern configuration of urban and metropolitan areas in the so-called smartization process. The purpose of this paper is to observe the connections between smart city features as conceptualized in the framework proposed by Giffinger et al. (2007) and new technologies as tools, and sustainability as the goal.

The connections are identified through a content analysis performed using NVivo on official reports issued by organizations, known as industry players within smart city projects, listed in the Navigant Research Report 2013.

The results frame ICT and sustainability as “across-the-board elements” because they connect with all of the services provided to communities in a smart city and play a key role in smart city planning. Specifically, sustainability and ICT can be seen as tools to enable the smartization process.

An all-in-one perspective emerges by embedding sustainability and ICT in smart interventions; further research could be conduct through direct interviews to city managers and industry players in order to understand their attitude towards the development of smart city projects.

Potential approaches emerging from this research are useful to city managers or large corporations partnering with local agencies in order to increase the opportunities for the long-term success of smart projects.

The results of this paper delineate a new research path looking at the development of new models that integrate drivers, ICT, and sustainability in an all-in-one perspective and new indicators for the evaluation of the interventions.

This paper aims to build on Fred Beard’s study of the world’s archives to identity historical advertising and marketing ephemera, published in this journal in 2018, by focussing on resources available in Europe to augment his survey.

Online searching, supplemented by literature emanating from the business archive sector, led to the identification of 177 repositories or online sites in Europe holding advertising and marketing archives of significance for researchers. These are set out in two accompanying tables.

A wide diversity of European archives that are open to researchers is revealed in this paper. Many are the archives of the business themselves, but a number of collecting repositories are also listed, brought together for the first time.

This paper focusses solely on Europe but does not claim to be comprehensive, as the study was time-limited and readers will, no doubt, know of resources that the author has missed. The findings relate mostly to Western Europe, so there is scope for further study to encompass archives in the former eastern bloc. Exploration of sources in Africa, Asia and Latin America would further supplement Beard’s original study.

This research brings together the broadest list of advertising and marketing sources open to researchers in Europe published to date. As Beard’s focus was more on the Americas, this examination redresses the balance with an array of European sources which, it is hoped, will contribute to the greater use of many little-known or under-researched resources by researchers across the world.