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 diferent 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
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.