18th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries:
Information and Research Science connecting to
Digital and Library Science
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzioa , Beatrice Portellib , Domenico Redavidc and
Gianmaria Silvelloa
a
  Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy
a
  bDepartment of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics, University of Udine, Italy
a
  Department of Computer Science, University of Bari, Italy




Foreword to the IRCDL 2022 Proceedings
The Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL) is an annual event for researchers
on Digital Libraries (DL) and related topics, organized by the Italian Research Community since
2005. The increasingly complex technical, practical and social challenges have contributed to
the evolution over the years of IRCDL, which increasingly aims to focus on the different points
of view coming from the various research and technical fields related to Digital Libraries. As a
result, IRCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including new
forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital
content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content; and
theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing.
Digital libraries will be more and more important in the field of Information and Research
Science as the use of intelligent techniques will drive changes in the way research is done in
the various disciplines. Whatever these changes may be, the link with information sources,
and in particular with digital libraries, will remain imperative. To this end, representatives
from academia, government, industry, research communities, and research infrastructures have
contributed to this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary
array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival
science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage
and humanities, and scientific communities. This year its focus is on bridging the wide field
of Research and Information Science with the related field of Digital Libraries. Indeed, IRCDL
historically approached on “Digital libraries” embracing the field at large also comprehending
three key areas of interest that can be synthesized as scholarly communication (e.g. research
data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science/computationally-intense
research (e.g. scientific workflows, Virtual Research Environments, reproducibility) and library,
archive and information science (e.g. governance, policies, open access, open science). IRCDL

IRCDL 2022: 18th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, February 24–25, 2022, Padova, Italy
                                       © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
sets itself as a national component of the DL ecosystem that comprehends the European DL
conference called “Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries” (TPDL), the International Conference
on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL), the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
and the International Journal of Digital Libraries. IRCDL 2022 (http://ircdl2022.dei.unipd.it/)
continues to pursue the goal of embracing the changes taking place in the design of future
DLs. Enlarging the DL’s scope involving new research communities and stakeholders is key to
gaining an understanding of their needs. From the needs can be identified what changes are
required focusing on technological advances that allow the applicability of new techniques and
approaches developed in specific research fields such as Artificial Intelligence. In accordance
with the Open Science principles, IRCDL continues to adopt a free and open access publication
scheme through the CEUR Workshop Proceedings system (CEUR-WS.org). IRCDL accepted
research papers, describing original ideas on the listed topics and on other fundamental aspects
of digital libraries and technology. Moreover, short papers on early research results, new results
on previously published works, and extended abstracts on previously published works were also
welcome. We accepted ten research papers and twenty-two short papers/extended abstracts.
Most of the papers are authored by Italian researchers, but this year we were happy to welcome
authors also from USA, Israel, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Latvia. All papers were
reviewed by three program committee members selected in the research community. The
conference keynote was by Dr. Carlo Meghini (Institute of Science and Information Technology
"A. Faedo", National Council of Research (CNR) - IT) with title “Linking Dante”, an interesting
presentation celebrating the great poet in the 700 years anniversary of his death. Finally, we
want to highlight that IRCDL 2023 will be held at the Department of Informatics of the University
of Bari (Italy), with the hope that the entire community, whom we thank for their work and
support, will be allowed to participate in attendance.

                                                                                  February 2022
                                                                             The Program Chairs