Digital Libraries as Technological Environments. Collaboration of Work and Future Perspectives

The nature of libraries has changed rapidly with the advent of technology, so far as to change the very way of understanding the library itself. In this paper we examine the impact that digital technologies have had on library workers, and note that so far technology has only been used to transpose the standard library practices, and that little has been done to fully exploit the new opportunities it introduced. To overcome this situation, we propose a graph-based organization of DL data, based on a technology mixing DBs and ontologies. We also propose a holistic data schema allowing to store information that is usually neglected by traditional cataloging and description standards used in libraries. This would enable the use of AI techniques that may significantly expand the effectiveness of data processing and may dramatically improve the exploitation possibilities of documents.