The 20th IRCDL conference
Since 2005 the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries is a yearly date for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics, organized by the Italian Research Community. Over the years IRCDL has become an important national forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. IRCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing. Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide. Representatives from academia, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage and humanities, and scientific communities. For its 20th birthday, the focus will be twofold: on the one hand, towards the future, by presenting novel contributions (e.g., investigating techniques and applications from Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Web Technologies) that may have a drastic impact on empowering the connection between digital and library science, especially at the conjunction with Open Science and academic publishing. On the other hand, towards the past, celebrating the birth and growth of the IRCDL community, which throughout the last 20 years embraced interests from a broad range of academic backgrounds comprehending scholarly communication (e.g., research data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science/computationally-intense research (e.g., scientific workflows, Virtual Research Environments, reproducibility) and library, archive and information science (e.g., governance, policies, open access, open science, and bibliometrics).