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How to foster the preservation and study of a born-digital literary archive? In the three chapters that comprise Digitale d’autore. Macchine, archivi, letterature the question is tackled from multiple points of view. In the first, after defining the object of investigation, Emmanuela Carbé outlines the historical, theoretical, and methodological aspects, including a definition of the relationship between writers and computers. This gives way in the central part of the volume to a review of the main experiences on both the national and international stage. Finally, the last section is dedicated to the critical framing of a work by investigating the born-digital archive conferred by the author to the institution in charge of its preservation.

For over twenty years public institutions and foundations committed in cultural heritage curation and preservation worked up methodologies, strategies and techniques for long-term digital preservation of digital resources. Thanks to a relevant number of initiatives and services carried on by international institutions and specialized agencies, public and private libraries reached a high level of awareness in this field which requires continuous adaptation due to the constant evolution of publishing industry and the rapid emergence of Open Science. After a quick review of digital preservation milestones, this article looks at some emerging trends and issues which characterize the constant transformation of digital preservation landscape. Dynamic generated digital contents and Open Science to fulfil findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse (FAIR) of digital assets are engaging new challenges for existing digital preservation services. Digital curation and digital preservation are deeply merged and proceed in parallel to assure long-term usage of digital resources and data. How to select and deploy digital preservation platforms is another complex area where Cloud services can offer the opportunity to reduce the costs of technical infrastructures maintenance and management. Policy and decision making institutional levels need more awareness to draw up digital preservation strategies and to activate services to assure digital contents and data long-term access and reuse. Finally the paper suggests to promote “digital preservation by design” as a new base rule to be applied since the conception of every project and initiative in the cultural heritage, scientific and academic contexts.

This paper aims at highlighting how interest in the issues of web and social media archiving and preservation has grown enormously, in parallel with the awareness of the importance of these ‘resources’ as privileged sources for reconstructing the history of our era. How will the historians of the future be able to reconstruct the historical period we are living through if memory institutions are not able to archive and preserve the websites and social media of institutions, public bodies, parties, associations, government bodies, political figures, and famous people in general, given that everything is now conveyed through these channels? The fragility of the web, then, would require immediate action and the launch of ‘web and social media archiving’ initiatives without delay, on pain of the disappearance of all that has been made available online in recent years, but on this point the situation in Italy - with a few exceptions - appears to lag far behind other European countries and enormously behind the Anglo-Saxon countries. There is therefore an urgent need to launch initiatives to raise awareness on these issues and to train the skills and professionalism required to conduct web and social media archiving and preservation projects.

Reflecting about the documentary heritage of artists requires the consideration of archival, legal, historical-artistic and museological factors. If the analogue productions of artifacts and the correlated documentation have been studied, transferring the creative perspective into a digital environment asks to face a reality in turmoil: the ways of expressing and representing contemporary art, in balance between digital and crypto art, require new visions in the production and management of works. In this redefinition of roles and relationships, which almost exclusively concern the documentary structure and the technological and digital components, document systems assume a primary role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European medieval manuscript heritage is seriously endangered. Private collectors, museums, and libraries, especially from those countries that cannot boast their own medieval relics, eagerly compete for medieval and pre-Renaissance manuscript and incunabula leaves from our cultural heritage. The fetishistic worship of manuscript fragments has only served to encourage their dismemberment. Mobilising as European scholars to demand the formulation and implementation of international laws that protect a particularly fragile type of cultural heritage is the only way to ensure their preservation for future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian law of digital preservation has determined, from 2014 to current, the start-up of more of 70 companies, named “conservatori accreditati”, to provide high quality digital preservation services to public and private organizations. The particularity of Italian strategy is that two institutions, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) and the Agency of Digital Italy (AgID), are defining methods, procedures and technical rules to archives preservation and digital records preservation without any evident coordination. The article aims to analyse the critical issues in current context to contribute to the harmonization of Italian rules for creating and preserving hybrid archives.

The article introduces the complete digital edition of Tommaso Campanella's letters. It is a transcription of the full corpus of 172 letters written by Campanella in the years 1591-1639. This work is built on the print collection edited by Germana Ernst and published in 2010 by Olschki. Beyond metadata, an asset in themselves, each letter is enriched by information about the manuscript source (including the archive or the library holding it), the various editions, and a brief summary. The collection offers a detailed and comprehensive vision of the harsh conditions Campanella had to live through during the trials and the long years of imprisonment, at the same time showing, first-hand, the philosophical and theological discussions he had with learned of his time. In order to enhance this intellectual network, the opportunity of including the collection within the great Italian and European epistolary projects has been explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the strategies and methods for preserving Linked Open Data (LOD). To this aim it first presents an overview of the main scientific initiatives that have dealt with this topic. Then it describes some digital technologies that may result useful for preserving LOD, providing some insights on their application to LOD. It also provides a concrete example of implementation of the Semantic Web technologies for preserving Linked Data. Finally, it suggests some specific themes and directions that should be further investigated in order to elaborate a comprehensive solution to this problem: the preservation of Linked Open Data cannot be demanded to a single tool or method, it is rather the result of technical, organizational and procedural choices that altogether make up a consistent framework for LOD preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PAD – Pavia Archivi Digitali was created in 2009, alongside the Centre for Research in the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors, with the aim of acquiring, preserving and giving access to born- digital papers of contemporary writers and journalists. The archives which were bestowed to PAD so far show a variety of features involving a considerable effort in defining and fine-tuning both the ingest procedures and the management of the preserved papers life-cycle. One of the crucial issues is the preliminary analysis of the logical and technical structure of these archives. For this purpose the writer is interviewed and more information is collected through a specific questionnaire. By combining the two one gains a valuable insight into his or her working methods and files arrangement logic. The literature on the subject is still quite scarce, since researchers have been more keen to focus either on traditional archives or on digital archives though characterized by a greater stability. To share reflections emerged in response to the various acquisitions is therefore the aim of this paper.

The essay proposes a reflection on the topics covered during the conference "The privilege of the written word: management, preservation and improvement of personal cards and books" organized by the Department of Sciences of Cultural Heritage of the University of Salerno, with the collaboration of the Library Centre of the University of Bologna, the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna and the National Commission of Special Libraries, Archives and Author Libraries of the Italian Libraries Association. Risks are analyzed, such as those related to the dispersion and fragmentation of materials during the life of the producer, good practices, with the presentation of concrete projects, the approach to new digital technologies. The conference days, organized in sessions, were divided by themes: "Books, papers, maps: the personal workshops of writing and the arts"; "Personal funds in excavation, description and management activities"; "Personal funds between physical space and digital space: the paths of access and enhancement". Part of the event was dedicated to the presentation of the Guidelines on the treatment of personal funds. The publication of the proceedings will certainly encourage new reflections and a remodeling of the same guidelines, also in consideration of the documentary typologies to be treated that were subject of deepening and report during these study days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the process developed by Binghamton University Libraries to extract embedded metadata from digital photographs and transform it into descriptive Dublin Core metadata for use in the Libraries’ digital preservation system. In 2011, Binghamton University Libraries implemented the Rosetta digital preservation system (from Ex Libris) to preserve digitized and born-digital materials. At the same time, the Libraries’ implemented the Primo discovery tool (from Ex Libris) to bring together not only the digital collections in Rosetta, but also bibliographic holdings from our integrated library system and other sources. Currently, the Libraries are working with the campus photographer to preserve and provide access to 350,000+ digital images. Most of these images depict campus events, such as Homecoming, Commencement, etc. that are of historical and immediate social value to the campus community. These images are used widely in marketing and outreach materials, and on the University’s website. However, owing to volume of photographs, as well as to budgetary and other constraints, it is not possible to have library staff inspect the photographs and create a complete descriptive metadata record for each, so we needed to explore different options. Each of photographer’s images contains embedded metadata (file format, date and time stamps, location, etc.) and additionally, many of the files also contain basic descriptive information supplied by the photographer, including his name, keywords and/or a short description. Using this basic metadata as a starting point, cataloguing and systems librarians at Binghamton University Libraries were able to create an automated process to reformat and enhance the available descriptive information, crosswalk it to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and map keywords to controlled subject and location terms (including Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), etc.) Following the initial set-up, the only steps requiring manual intervention are extracting and identifying new keywords, updating the mapping table, running the scripts, proofreading the Dublin Core metadata once it has been produced, and lastly, depositing the images and metadata into the preservation system. Using this collection as a case study, we will demonstrate how embedded metadata can be upcycled in order to produce complete descriptive metadata records, which can then be integrated and indexed with metadata from other sources, and ultimately made discoverable by library users. After all, no matter how well a repository takes care of a file, how well it keeps, preserves or displays it, it makes no sense to put an digital object into a system if you cannot find it later. The Libraries’ workflow and portions of code will be shared; issues and challenges involved will be discussed. While this case study is specific to Binghamton University Libraries, examples of strategies used at other institutions will also be introduced. This paper should be useful to anyone interested in describing large quantities of photographs or other materials with preexisting embedded metadata.

The article illustrates AlmaDL Journals, the open access e-publishing service supporting scientific peer reviewed journals edited by Departments and research groups of the University of Bologna. Digital technologies and the Internet have deeply changed the way researchers and scholars access and share information. Moreover new technologies challenge professionals involved in the publishing value chain and publication life cycle at various levels. The traditional scholarly communication model fails to meet researchers’ needs and expectations. Initiatives such as the AlmaDL Journals seeks to provide alternative models that take full advantage of the digital environment and new media while ensuring quality requirements and the traditional functions of scientific serial publications.

The expression Cloud Computing is used for referring to a variety of platforms supplying application and resources displaced into the net. Applications to libraries are many: email services; the possibility of developing new tasks without investing resources in hardware; digital resources preservation; library catalogue management, and so on. One of the strongest aspects of this system is the flexible payment (pay-as-you-go), depending on release ways and on real usage. Benefits for libraries using cloud computing concern the quality of services, and the infrastructural and management cost control, in particular regarding the digital preservation. This kind of technology can present negative aspects related to the strong dependency from internet, to data safety, and to the lack of standards and shared metrics.L'espressione Cloud computing si riferisce a una varietà di piattaforme e di tecnologie informatiche che forniscono applicazioni per l'utilizzo di risorse hardware e software dislocate nella rete. Le applicazioni alle biblioteche sono numerose, spaziano dal semplice servizio di posta elettronica alla possibilità di sviluppare nuove applicazioni senza investire nell'acquisizione dell’hardware necessario, dalla conservazione delle risorse digitali ad applicazioni per la gestione del catalogo. Uno dei principali punti di forza di questi sistemi è costituito dal pagamento flessibile (pay-as-you-go), a seconda delle modalità di rilascio e all'effettivo utilizzo. I benefici per le biblioteche che utilizzano il Cloud computing riguardano la qualità dei servizi forniti e il contenimento dei costi infrastrutturali e gestionali, in particolare nell'ambito della digital preservation. Questo tipo di tecnologia presenta tuttavia alcuni aspetti negativi, dovuti alla forte dipendenza dalla rete, al rischio per sicurezza dei dati, alla mancanza di standard e strumenti metrici unanimemente condivisi.

The expression Cloud Computing is used for referring to a variety of platforms supplying application and resources displaced into the net. Applications to libraries are many: email services; the possibility of developing new tasks without investing resources in hardware; digital resources preservation; library catalogue management, and so on. One of the strongest aspects of this system is the flexible payment (pay-as-you-go), depending on release ways and on real usage. Benefits for libraries using cloud computing concern the quality of services, and the infrastructural and management cost control, in particular regarding the digital preservation. This kind of technology can present negative aspects related to the strong dependency from internet, to data safety, and to the lack of standards and shared metrics.

L'articolo affronta le tematiche legate ai problemi della conservazione a lungo termine del contenuto degli archivi digitali. Il materiale d'archivio richiede un'attenzione speciale ad aspetti quali la credibilità, il valore giuridico, i diritti morali e legali e la privacy. La necessità di assicurare accessibilità e integrità ai dati informatici è tuttavia una problematica che attraversa tutti i campi dell'informatizzazione ed è strettamente legata a fattori come la frequente duplicazione e la corretta scelta dei metadadi. Attraverso l'analisi del caso di studio rappresentato da cIRcle, l'istitutional digital repository della University of British Columbia (UBC), il contributo mostra problemi, rischi e soluzioni utili nella gestione di un archivio digitale, mostrando che l'esperienza degli archivisti può essere utile per sviluppare sistemi legati a depositi di informazione non prettamente archivistici.

In recent years, it has become increasingly common to entrust records to digital repositories; this assumes an implicit confidence in the repositories reliability, and therefore is urgent to identify the criteria on which to evaluate them. The Data Seal of Approval is a set of sixteen criteria that can be used to ensure that archived data can still be found, understood and used in the future. It is a basic level of certification but it is very useful to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the deposit; in any case, it constitutes a solid basis for further certification of compliance to ISO 16363 or DIN 31644. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of Data Seal of Approval in the wider context of digital repositories' certification.

The article analyzes the role that policies have in guaranteeing the quality of creation, management and maintenance of digital resources, and offers an overview of national and international policies and standards that refer to records management and digital preservation. Finally, the article illustrates ICCROM’s records management manual and its digital preservation policy and strategy.

The paper explains the standpoint of a regional public custodian, the "Polo archivistico dell'Emilia-Romagna" (ParER), engaged in the long-term preservation of electronic medical records. This perspective points out that this documentary domain, which is characterized by a mature use of information technology that goes under the name of e-Health, represents a broad front of challenges and issues. The analysis focuses on the various aspects of the dynamism that distinguishes the steps of creation, handling, maintenance of electronic medical records, in contrast with the stability that is peculiar of the long-term preservation. The analysis highlights that the electronic medical records renew the traditional relationship among context, metadata, documentary form. But above all it is worthy of note that electronic medical records urge the "Polo archivistico" to adopt a custodial perspective not inward-looking, but that is able to give preserved digital archives back their nature of "social construction". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, it has become increasingly common to entrust records to digital repositories; this assumes an implicit confidence in the repositories reliability, and therefore is urgent to identify the criteria on which to evaluate them. The Data Seal of Approval is a set of sixteen criteria that can be used to ensure that archived data can still be found, understood and used in the future. It is a basic level of certification but it is very useful to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the deposit; in any case, it constitutes a solid basis for further certification of compliance to ISO 16363 or DIN 31644. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of Data Seal of Approval in the wider context of digital repositories' certification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the role that policies have in guaranteeing the quality of creation, management and maintenance of digital resources, and offers an overview of national and international policies and standards that refer to records management and digital preservation. Finally, the article illustrates ICCROM's records management manual and its digital preservation policy and strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical media (such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Disc) are probably among the most commonly used media for the preservation of digital records over time, especially in the case of digital archives whose producers are individuals, families or small to medium sized organizations. These media are fragile and it is important to know precisely how to manage them and which precautions should be taken in order to get reasonable assurance on their ability to preserve documents. This article aims to clarify what are the critical issues of optical media, how to take care of them and what are the strategies to be put in place to prevent the loss of documents that are stored on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a remarkable growth of the use of e-resources, and especially of e-journals by researchers, in every field of studies. Ensuring the accessibility and use by future generations is an important challenge for university and research libraries. The paper is particularly dealing with the problems of digital preservation of relevant scientific documents issued according to the Open access movement. After examining the characteristics of the diffusion and citation impact of Open access papers in scientific literature, the paper highlights the need for all the research libraries to preserve digital contents published in OA, to ensure the access and use for future researchers. The KB e-Depot and DOAJ project for OA digital preservation is taken into consideration, and systems for digital archiving and for cooperative preservation of scholarly journals' contents: PORTICO, the LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS, are presented.

There has been a remarkable growth of the use of e-resources, and especially of e-journals by researchers, in every field of studies. Ensuring the accessibility and use by future generations is an important challenge for university and research libraries. The paper is particularly dealing with the problems of digital preservation of relevant scientific documents issued according to the Open access movement. After examining the characteristics of the diffusion and citation impact of Open access papers in scientific literature, the paper highlights the need for all the research libraries to preserve digital contents published in OA, to ensure the access and use for future researchers. The KB e-Depot and DOAJ project for OA digital preservation is taken into consideration, and systems for digital archiving and for cooperative preservation of scholarly journals' contents: PORTICO, the LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association of a persistent identifier to a digital resource is a best practice helping in solving a reliable information resources retrieving on the web, other than the Internet Error 404. At the present moment, different kind of technologies and standards such as DOI, Handle, and Cool URI are establishing. However, within scientific and cultural communities and in the semantic web, the main need is still focused on ensuring resources authenticity, provenance, and preservation in the log term period. For this reason, a third authoritative party such as the National Library is necessary, managing identifiers and taking in consideration technical as well as community and process requirements for preservation aims. The National Bibliography Number (NBN) originated in the context of the role and the responsibilities of national libraries in the field of universal bibliographic control, oriented to the identification of resources to be preserved in the long period. In Italy NBN:IT is going to be linked to the legal deposit, and acrivity traditionally up to the national libraries guaranteeing its trustability. The project, coordinated by the national libraries of Florence, Rome, and Venice, by the Foundation Rinascimento Digitale and by the Conference of Rectors of the Italian Universities, completes the current offer of Persistent Identifiers.