Since 2005 the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL) is a yearly date for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics, organized by the Italian Research Community. Over the years IRCDL has become an important national forum focused on technical, practical, and social issues, but it also attracted submissions from international researchers from Europe and beyond. To further promote the increasing international and multidisciplinary aspects of the conference, IRCDL now becomes the conference on \Information and Research science Connecting to Digital and Library science".
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 (DLs) may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide. Representatives from academia, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, and others are invited to participate in this 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 scienti c communities.
The world of DLs is going through profound transformations, and recently the scope of IRCDL was broadened to embrace these changes in order to design the next future of DL. The purpose is to open up to new research communities and stakeholders, thus bridging the broad eld of Research and Information Science with DL's related eld. Indeed, IRCDL historically approached on \Digital libraries" embracing the eld 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/computationallyintense research (e.g. scienti c work ows, 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 includes the European DL conference called \Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries" (TPDL), the International Conference on Asia-Paci c Digital Libraries (ICADL), the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries and the International Journal of Digital Libraries. It is also in connection with other initiatives, such as the Italian Workshop on Arti cial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage (IAI4CH) organized by the Italian Association for Arti cial Intelligence.
IRCDL 2023 (http://lacam.di.uniba.it/IRCDL23/) was held at the Students' Center of the University of Bari (Italy) on 23-24 February 2023. This year the speci c focus was on Arti cial Intelligence and Semantic Web Technologies Empowering Digital Libraries. Indeed, AI is nowadays pervasive and is being embedded in all kinds of applications. Its techniques, ranging from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning to Machine Learning and Data Mining, from Natural Language Processing to Image Processing, as well as methods for metadata enrichment and data analysis, may cause breakthroughs in DL research and practices for all kinds of stakeholders. Semantic Web technologies are key to exploiting the semantics of information preserved in DLs, thus enabling advanced and personalized services and functionality for its users.
IRCDL recently moved to a free of charge open access publishing scheme thanks to the CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) system. 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, project papers describing the status of relevant research projects, and extended abstracts on previously published works were also welcome. 6 research papers and 17 short papers, project papers and extended abstracts by authors from Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, UK, Ukraine and USA were accepted this year. All papers were reviewed by two program committee members selected in the National and International research community.