Since its inception in 2005, the “Information and Research science Connecting to Digital and Library science” (formerly Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL) has been an important annual event for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics. Over the years IRCDL has become a staple in the national research landscape, focusing on technical, practical, as well as social issues, while also attracting submissions from international researchers from Europe and beyond.
IRCDL encompasses the realm of Digital Libraries (DLs) in all its forms, including emerging types of information institutions, systems managing diverse digital content, innovative methods for curating and distributing digital materials, and theoretical perspectives on information media, such as document genres and electronic publishing. Digital Libraries can be viewed as a modern type of information institution, or an extension of traditional library services. Representatives from various sectors of civil society, such as academia, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, are invited to participate in this conference. IRCDL draws from a broad, 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.
The world of DLs is undergoing significant transformations, prompting IRCDL to expand its scope in order to adapt to these changes, with the aim of opening up to new research communities, and ofering new connections to the broad ifeld of Research and Information Science. IRCDL historically approached the realm of DLs under a broad perspective, while also identifying three main areas of interest, namely scholarly communication (e.g. research data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science, or 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 positions itself as part of the broader DL ecosystem, which also includes the European “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, and it maintains connections to other initiatives, such as the Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage (IAI4CH), organized by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.
IRCDL 2025 (https://ircdl2025.uniud.it/) was held at the Biblioteca Rizzi of the University of Udine (Italy) on February 20-21, 2025. This year’s edition features two tracks. The first track revolves around Computer Science Foundations for Digital Libraries, with the aim of examining core computer science concepts that are essential for digital libraries. It covers algorithms and Artificial Intelligence methods for information retrieval and data management, system architectures for large-scale digital collections, and practical applications in areas such as academic research and cultural heritage preservation. The second track is focused on Digital Humanities, in particular the exploration of the intersection of digital technologies and humanities research. It examines computational methods for analyzing and preserving cultural artifacts, text mining techniques for large-scale literary analysis, and digital platforms for collaborative scholarship.
IRCDL welcomed research papers, describing original ideas on aspects related to digital libraries, short papers reporting early research results or new results on previously published works, as well as extended abstracts on previously published works. This year we accepted 17 regular papers, and 16 short papers and extended abstracts. All papers were reviewed by two or three program committee members selected in the National and International research community.