Pierluigi Feliciati

Digital Natives and Specialised Digital Libraries: A Study of Europeana Users

The alignment of user needs with the technical capabilities of modern digital libraries is an area attracting the interest of researchers and practitioners. Europeana, conceived with the intention of offering a single access point to European cultural heritage, has been developed in recent years with a continuous effort to identify and respond to the needs of a range of users. This paper presents a study of two user communities – young people and the general public. The study, conducted between October 2009 and January 2010, comprised a series of focus groups and media labs in Bulgaria, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. A distinctive aspect of this study is that it combines questionnaire-based and verbal feedback gathered from users with evidence of user actions whilst undertaking a well-defined task. The paper presents the context and the methodology of the study, and some of the data gathered within the study which helps to understand better the attitude of digital natives towards specialised digital libraries. The data analysis supports several conclusions: specialised digital libraries require strong advocacy to target the “digital natives” generation which tends to prefer general purpose search engines to specialised resources; young users are confident that they know how to use advanced search yet there is little evidence of their applying these skills in contrast to general public users; the perception of digital libraries differs in groups from different countries. The study contributes to the better understanding of some behavioural characteristics of users of digital libraries.

From Access to Use: Premises for a User-Centered Quality Model for the Development of Archives Online

Although the traditional mediation of archivists supplied the necessity of users in accessing archival records and documents, present archives online, i.e. digital environments offering archival content, often require specific competences to be browsed and searched. Differently from most digital libraries, their specialized, separated and hierarchic units of information are not easily accessible for non-expert users. No reference model is currently available to ensure quality to archives online in terms of user needs, experience and satisfaction, and rarely archival projects organize specific user studies to finalize language, interfaces and architectures. After introducing the state of the art and presenting the main issues emerging from user studies applied to archives online, this paper suggests key concepts and methods for creating a quality assessment model centered on final users’ engagement, in view of going beyond the simple goal of accessing archives, towards the promotion of their effective use.

Online Archives for Users: premises for a Quality Reference Model

The traditional paradigm of archival mediation had to come to grips with the web environment. If guides, inventories and indexes act as mediation tools between what is inside archives and whoever needs to access them, traditional archival finding aids are not ready to be published on the web, where users are basically free from any mediation. The starting point for rethinking the archival mediation paradigm could be the principle that “output is not input” (Sheir 2005), and the compliance to current archival standards is a necessary condition, but not sufficient to guarantee the usability of archives online. Rarely archival projects organize specific user studies to finalize language, interfaces and architectures of the new environments. The paper, based also on a huge research with user studies on an archives online prototype, aims to propose some first elements to guide the drawing of a new model, built to ensure quality to archives online in terms of user needs, experience and satisfaction, and presents the case study of evaluation of a huge archival portal based on an user-centred approach, during the formative phase.

I professionisti dei beni culturali: competenze, forme associative e mercato del lavoro / The professionals of cultural heritage: competences, associations and labour market

Resoconto della tavola rotonda, quarta sessione del convegno, dal titolo: I professionisti dei beni culturali: competenze, forme associative e mercato del lavoro

Dibattito seguito alla sessione: La cultura della valorizzazione in Italia: altri punti di vista / The discussion about the session: The culture of enhancement in Italy: other points of view

Dibattito seguito alla seconda sessione del convegno, dal titolo: La cultura della valorizzazione in Italia: altri punti di vista

MAG, an Italian XML Application Profile for the Submission and Transfer of Metadata and Digitized Cultural Contents

MAG (“Metadati Amministrativi e Gestionali”, i.e. administrative and management metadata) is an Italian structural metadata application profile totally compliant to international standards, developed with the main goal of promoting among cultural organizations the aggregation of a least common set of technical and management metadata to guarantee the good submission and transfer of metadata and cultural digital objects in local or distributed digital libraries.

IL CAPITALE CULTURALE. Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage 5/2012

Il n. 5/2012 raccoglie contributi di Annalisa Banzi, Elisa Bonacini, Pierluigi Feliciati, Luca Gulli, Lucia Nardi, Chiara Piva, Emilio Sereni, Francesca Talo, Federico Valacchi e Mattia Voltaggio. Issue n. 5/2012 collects papers by Annalisa Banzi, Elisa Bonacini, Pierluigi Feliciati, Luca Gulli, Lucia Nardi, Chiara Piva, Emilio Sereni, Francesca Talo, Federico Valacchi and Mattia Voltaggio.