The Digital Libraries Applications project analyses the problems of people and communities that use digital libraries, and investigates the current services capable of satisfying real needs, in order to evidence necessities and obstacles to improving services, and to stimulate cooperation between different cultural institutions and between public institutions and private institutions.  Work began in the summer of 2005 and, in the following year, produced the expected results.

The approach to the study of digital libraries places the user at the centre of the digital universe, in the conviction that adopting this perspective makes it possible to redesign the coordinates of the digital ambit.As the i2010 Digital Libraries initiative strongly underlined, digital libraries must concentrate on user studies, in order to improve services, also through creating forms of cooperative activity.

For these reasons, the guiding criterion that supports and inspires the Digital Libraries Applications project is to concentrate focus on people and user communities that use digital resources.

The priorities the Study Group identified in order to realise the Digital Libraries Applications project emerge in three lines of research on:

• user communities
• organisation of digital collections and services
• information systems.

Project Duration: 2005/2006