This paper reports on the presentation made during the panel on \Digital Libraries and Digital Archives: Problems and Challenges for AI Approaches" of the 1st Workshop on Intelligent Techniques At LIbraries and Archives (ITALIA 2015) co-located with the XIV Conference of the Italian Association for Arti cial Intelligence, 22 September 2015, Ferrara, Italy1.
Throughout their history, cultural heritage institutions such as libraries and
archives have had two central purposes. They have been charged rstly with
preserving artefacts of cultural signi cance, and secondly with describing and
cataloguing these artefacts in a way that makes them accessible to a variety of
audiences, from experienced researchers to members of the general public [
The advent of the widespread digitization of cultural heritage collections has signi cant implications for institutions that hold these types of collections. The imperative to preserve unique and delicate resources by producing digital surrogates has been, and continues to be, an important driving force for digitization projects that see the participation of cultural heritage institutions together with research and industrial organisations experts in computer science.
Important though preservation undoubtedly is, access is more important still.
As such, computer science can play an important role in contributing to the
creation of the necessary methods for inventing and designing systems able to
manage and preserve digital resources in a way that the systems themselves can
be enjoyed by both non-specialist and specialist users. The di erent types of
systems of this sort are often named \digital library system" [
A new generation of systems that manage and preserve digital resources of
cultural heritage is based on methods of active involvement and interaction of
different categories of users [
The conception and realization of this new generation of management systems will concern in particular the need to create new models for automating processes of representing and processing speci c cultural heritage resources that we want to represent and manage in digital form. Depending on the type of cultural resources, which from time to time can be of speci c interest, the design process of a new model of information management can result from e ective collaboration between experts in the speci c domain of cultural heritage and experts in information and computer science. In fact, the experts in the speci c domain of cultural heritage { such as archives, art history, library science, archeology, linguistics or history { know the history and methods of their speci c domain, while the experts in information and computer science know the story and methods of computing. In a synergistic relationship for the development of new methodological solutions, experts in the two sectors may consider the functional and informative requirements as well as the tasks users need to carry out and come up with new methods and solutions.
The design process then is not limited to the analysis of user requirements conducted in isolation by the computer science experts. Instead it requires a synergistic cooperation of the computer scientists together with specialists in the speci c eld of cultural heritage of interest. Once the new model has been created, a corresponding new information management system can be devised. Computer science then becomes one of the cultures needed to design the new system, which, through an innovative approach to management, will produce new knowledge that could not previously be represented or processed.
We could ask us why we need to devise new models and systems. The answer is because we want to consider aspects of reality that are more complex than those that were previously addressed. As we increase the complexity of the aspects of reality that we want to address and manage, we need new methods and systems capable of dealing with them and managing them. Bearing in mind the greater complexity of the aspects of reality that we want to address, we need to devise methods to match them and systems to manage them.
The rst step towards tackling a new aspect of reality, which will be managed with the help of computer methods, is to highlight the di erent levels of possible intervention and divide the overall problem into sub-problems, as is common when devising a scienti c solution for solving a complex problem. The subproblems, in the context of information processing systems, are identi ed and highlighted by considering the interaction that the system we want to build is going to have with its users. In fact, the system has to be used by di erent categories of users through an interface that has the features and functions that users need. The interface capabilities are based on internal processing features, functions and data management information that are usable and manageable.
Consequently, a system of this type is usually represented on three levels: { the external level, where the interaction takes place between the users and the presentation layer services provided by the information processing model designed and manufactured by the system; { the intermediate level, or logic level of services, where the processing of information of speci c interest to the application that is made available to the users is carried out; and { the innermost level, or logic level of the data, where the information of interest is represented and stored to be made available to the user, possibly with the aid of permanent storage devices.
One thing to keep in mind when designing and creating a new system of information management is interoperability. Any system for the management and preservation of digital resources of cultural heritage does not operate in full \isolation" from other management systems, rather it needs to be \interoperable" with other management systems of information that are of interest and that can be related or connected to the new system.
There are several aspects to be taken into account if we want to build
interoperable systems and provide quali ed services to the nal user [
Examples of such systems have been made available in recent years in the
context of the SIAR2 and the CULTURA3 projects [
If we have correctly applied the new method to create systems suitable for representing and managing the various information resources that are of interest to diversi ed cultural heritage institutions { such as libraries, archives and museums both general and specialized { we now have at our disposal a number of systems that manage the representations of digital resources together with the information resources themselves.
While these systems become a practice that provide nal and experienced
users with those digital collections of information, we have available an amount
of data that is professionally managed and that increases over time. This type
of data is of the sort that is maintained in the so-called \curated databases",
which require a great deal of human e ort to populate and update. The value
of curated databases lies in the organization and the quality of the data they
contain [
This increasing quantity of data and related information provides us with
a new way of exploring previously available digital resources together with the
newly related and newly inserted resources. Although these systems have been
designed and developed in line with the previously introduced new vision of
creating digital libraries and archives systems, with the aim of better exploiting
the digital resources managed by the di erent systems, practices would be needed
that address and manage interoperability among systems at a higher level of
abstraction than what is presently done and in line with what has been proposed
in [
When the interoperability at a higher level of abstraction between di erent
digital libraries and archives systems will be a reality, since most of the
systems would be conceived using the combination of knowledge of the domain
specialist together with knowledge of the computer science specialist, the
resulting information resources would be richer and similar to those that at present
are available in data-intensive science practice [