PNRR Culture, the last mile of digital construction sites

What were the original intentions of the Digital Library? Have the objectives been achieved?

The Ministry of Culture has historically suffered from a strong fragmentation in heritage cataloguing and management systems. The different Directorates General, in particular those dedicated to archives, libraries and museums, have in fact over time developed autonomous platforms and databases, built on sectorial needs. The idea behind the Digital Library was therefore to overcome this inhomogeneity, creating an ecosystem where all heritages could come together, allowing them to dialogue in the same environment. At the basis of the initiative is therefore the desire to reconstruct the complexity of cultural heritage in its entirety: just think of how, when entering a museum, one does not perceive the architecture of the building, the works on display or, for example, the accompanying archives as separate elements, but as a unitary and coherent whole. Here, this digital ecosystem enables precisely such an experience to be replicated by linking different digitised cultural assets through 'cross-domain knowledge graphs'. This means that the Digital Library's digital ecosystem does not just 'put online' cultural heritage, but connects it with each other in an intelligent way. In practice, the different digitised contents, the work of art, the archival document, the photograph, the book or the artefact are not treated as isolated elements, but as nodes in a network. This network is constructed through so-called 'knowledge graphs', i.e. systems that relate different data on the basis of meaningful links: e.g. the same author, the same historical period, the same place or the same event. The result is that the user is not limited to searching for a single object, but can explore the heritage by following connections: for example, moving from an author to his works, then to the places where he lived, to related historical events, and so on.
A second objective concerned the recovery of the hidden digital heritage. Italy's cultural heritage, in fact, is extremely vast and, despite the progress made in recent years, a significant share has not yet been digitised. The PNRR has therefore given a strong impetus to the digitisation of lesser-known or never exhibited material, such as the medal collection or historical registers kept in archives. The project for the reconstruction of the national newspaper library, which aims precisely at bringing together and digitising the various Italian newspaper titles, is also part of this direction. The aim is to encourage collaboration between different institutes in order to recompose, in digital form, the unity of the national periodical heritage. At the same time, work is being done on a digital heritage that is often dispersed or difficult to reuse, including obsolete media, unstructured archives and digitisations that are not yet fully integrated. Through ECoMiC, information becomes searchable in a unified way, allowing an overall reading of the heritage and also contributing to the recomposition of dispersed archival and bibliographic fonds.

How will this digital transformation project concretely change the way cultural heritage is managed and valued in Italia? What are the main impacts?

This path has a significant impact on both the management and the valorisation of cultural heritage, because it intervenes at the basis of the cataloguing and digitisation processes, which constitute the first level of protection. Digitising, in fact, also means 'photographing' the state of conservation of an asset at a given moment, creating a stable and verifiable documentation that becomes an integral part of conservation and restoration activities.
In terms of valorisation, the ECoMiC ecosystem makes it possible to reuse digital resources in a much broader way than in the past: not only for advanced access and consultation, but also for innovative applications such as predictive restoration, the creation of immersive experiences and forms of gamification, up to the development of new research and fruition tools. In this perspective, ECoMiC is destined to become the main showcase of digital cultural heritage in Italia and, at the same time, the natural interface to Europe. If the system succeeds in integrating the entire digital heritage, including state, territorial and regional institutes, and in making it fully usable, it will become a strategic resource not only at the national level, but also internationally as a showcase of our nation.

 What will happen to institutions that have not joined ECoMiC or do not have the necessary resources to start digitisation?

So, the Ministry has already launched a communication campaign to promote adhesion to the ECoMiC platform, and small national funds have also been activated for those institutes that did not have adequate digital systems, with the aim of also recovering the digitisation already carried out 'in-house'. At this stage, it is crucial to make the institutes understand the advantages of the system, not only in terms of access and interoperability, but also in terms of increased security in data storage. At the same time, it is important to clarify that the model is not a centralisation on the part of the Ministry: the institutes will continue to maintain full autonomy in the management of their own systems, standards and procedures, in the museum, archives and library fields. The objective is not to replace the individual realities, but to put them in a position to operate in an interoperable manner, enhancing heterogeneous databases within a common and coherent framework. In this sense, the role of the Ministry, through the Digital Library, is to provide a shared technological infrastructure, capable of putting fragmented experiences back into the system without cancelling their specificities.

What will happen after the end of the investment?

With a total investment of around EUR 500 million, it is clear that the implementation effort will not be completed by the deadline of 30 June. However, the question of economic sustainability remains crucial: on the one hand, the Ministry will have to take charge of the management and evolutionary maintenance of the system; on the other hand, it will be necessary to guarantee adequate resources for new digitisation campaigns, which are indispensable to keep the flow of metadata and digital content continuous and vital. Funding modalities are currently being defined. In this context, the main challenge in the coming months will be to consolidate the existing infrastructure and ensure its continuity beyond the extraordinary phase of the NRP, transforming an exceptional intervention into a structural and permanent platform. Only in this way will it be possible to guarantee the full integration of the different digital heritages, their real interoperability, and a stable dissemination of content on a national and European scale, making digital culture not a short-term project, but an ordinary and lasting component of heritage protection, knowledge and valorisation policies.