Angela Di Iorio

Establishing a digital library in wide-ranging university's context: The Sapienza Digital Library experience

The Sapienza Digital Library (SDL) is a research project undertaken by Sapienza Universita di Roma, the largest Europe’s campus, and the Italian supercomputer center Cineca.

The Sapienza Digital Library from the holistic vision to the actual implementation

Abstract The Sapienza Digital Library (SDL) was released in December 2013 as result of a research project undertaken by Sapienza University of Rome and the Cineca consortium, since 2011. The digital library has been collecting materials coming from different kind of organizations including departments, libraries, and archives, belonging or donated to Sapienza University. The main result of the project was the development of an information framework supporting multidisciplinary organizations in managing digital materials, maintaining scientific, organizational and operational responsibilities. The technical solution adopted has found a trade-off between the standardization of the digital processes and products, and the preservation of the scientific materials’ peculiarities. The automatic standard translation, and the enrichment of the digital resources metadata have reached the main goal of providing digital resources with the essential information necessary to their management in different technological contexts. The reuse of the digital information and contents, in different application contexts, has converted the holistic vision of a digital library in the implementation of an information infrastructure, setting the foundation for the long-term access and usability of its digital assets.

A Semantic Model for Content Description in the Sapienza Digital Library

In this paper is presented the semantic model defined for descriptive metadata of resources, managed by the Sapienza Digital Library. The semantic model is derived from the Metadata Object Descriptive Schema, a digital library descriptive standard, for library applications. The semantic model can be used as top level conceptual reference model, in order to support the implementation of semantic web technologies for digital library’s descriptive metadata. The semantic model is intended to be agnostic about the technology system to be adopted. The creation of resources’ connections toward the linked data cloud, as well as the opportunity of exploiting the potential of services based on the ontology use, will rely on a well-defined semantic model, which has been widely tested by the implementation of a descriptive metadata profile.

A Digital Infrastructure for Trustworthiness - The Sapienza Digital Library Experience

The building process of Sapienza Digital Library’s (SDL) digital resources was designed for collecting the information required by the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Preservation Description Information(PDI): Provenance, Reference, Fixity, Context, and Access Rights Information. The Submission Information Packages’(SIP) preservation metadata was encoded in the semantics of the PREMIS standard which is the implementation metadata set, mapped from the OAIS conceptual model. The conformant implementation of the PREMIS standard was one of the principles which permeates the SIP building process. All relevant legal aspects and formal agreements, referred to the organizations involved in the different OAIS functions of the SDL digital repository, were analyzed and structured for their inclusion into the forthcoming AIP management, and for unleashing of the preservation strategies, and for supporting the authenticity of resources.

Applicability of digital library descriptive metadata to the contemporary artworks: The Sapienza digital library case study

The metadata framework which supports preservation, management and dissemination of the Sapienza Digital Library (SDL) resources, was built on the most spread digital libraries standards’ combination, endorsed by the Library of Congress. This article explores the applicability of the SDL metadata framework to the contemporary art field. It addresses the mapping of the SDL metadata semantics toward museums metadata standards, and analyses the information model’s differences, locating complexities in the specific field and technical difficulties in translation. The applicability study is useful to improve the SDL interoperability in the management of the differences in information granularity, and to fulfill the lack or to avoid the waste of information. It is also, the theoretical basement for the implementation of export functions toward resources’ aggregators like Europeana, focused also on cultural objects.

Providing Proof of Trustworthiness Reconstructing Digital Objects' Custody Chain

Providing proof of the trustworthiness of the digital contents, supported by digital objects, goes through the reconstruction of information which could address replication of preserving repositories, heterogeneity in the maintenance approaches, and differences of the technological applications. In this research will be investigated how to use Semantic Web technology for providing technological evidence, about custody chain, ensuring that the digital content is what it was purported to be at its creation time.