Ricerc@Sapienza

Many digital collections lie underused if not used at all in the repositories of Sapienza University. These collections are mostly the result of research activities and therefore they are characterized by variety. Such a variety makes it very difficult to consider these sources as a whole and hinders their integration into a common system. This project aims to develop a mockup environment for managing and accessing the present and future digital collections at Sapienza University. Such an environment will be both a framework of policies, guidelines, standards and rules for managing the process; and a system for managing the digital objects. The former will support the creation of digital objects according to a set of shared directives, the latter will provide the digital representation and documentation of the cultural heritage. In other words, the environment we aim to create is not just an application: it is rather the combination of the technical dimension together with the procedural and operational dimension.

Digitization is more than just scanning a physical object, it is rather a migration of an object from physical to digital environment, which means transforming the object according to a set of predefined rules. Once the objects are ingested into the system, the platform can be used as a tool for research: users will not need to go in and out from different information silos, they will move smoothly from one collection to another, from one format to another, across objects and subject areas. In addition, managing different collections in a common framework will allow for planning long term preservation: all digital collections along with the applications needed to access them will be obsolete soon, so a common strategy is needed to face obsolescence. To this aim the platform will integrate a workflow for guaranteeing the sustainability of the long term preservation and the reusability of digital research objects for the next generations of scholars.