The project intends to develop a prototype free from the management systems of the single cultural institutions, which shall realise a national register of persistent identifiers for the digital cultural objects on the Internet, and experiment a service of resolution and access to these resources by inserting (entering – inputting) several elements of novelty of (in) the system’s architecture and functionality with respect to the technological solutions currently proposed or being studied.
The project’s principal objective is to experiment a new technology based on the Uniform Resource Name (URN), utilising the National Bibliography Number (NBN) as the reference namespace, and to develop a prototype oriented at implementing an identification service of the digital cultural works on the Internet, with the intention of facilitating citizens’ access to resources, and arousing sensitivity/compelling cultural institutions to apply digital preservation programmes for their own digital resources.
This solution is conceived especially for those resources that do not possess any type of identification (i.e. doctoral theses, digitalisations of antique books, etc), but in perspective, it can also be extended to unifying all digital cultural resources under a single code, even those already identified by codes like ISBN, ISSN, SICI. The resources identified will thus be able to reside on the systems of the cultural institutions that have the rights to manage their sub-domain, and/or in legal deposit systems.
The persistent identification of resources on the Internet is one of the fundamental problems of the cultural world, especially within ‘digital library’ and ‘digital preservation’ applications which seek to use the Internet as a platform for searching for and disseminating contents. National libraries mandated to collect, maintain and archive the national cultural heritage also for Internet resources can assume an important role in satisfying these necessities.
An essential component in realising this "long-term availability" is the use of Persistent Identifiers (PI), which solves the problem of univocal identification and reliable addressing on the Internet. Another component essential to implement a PI service is the reliability and credibility of the institution that stands security for the maintenance of the PI-URL association register. Hence arises the necessity to implement a service for URN assignment and resolution on the national level (care of the BNCF), based on an NBN oriented towards resources for cultural properties. The decision to utilise the NBN is due to the fact that it is a namespace of the exclusive pertinence of national libraries (every country has registered a sub-namespace at the Library of Congress: for Italy: NBN:IT ISO 3166); this guarantees the presence of the requisites of stability and permanence necessary for an institution that intends to manage a PI service.
Development is oriented towards utilising open-source technologies in such a manner that the ready availability of the software tools can serve as a stimulus for a generalised adhesion to experimenting on the national level, as well as for implementing analogous services in other European countries. The expected impact of the project will therefore be to extend, as thoroughly as possible on the national level, the adoption of this technology of stable addressing of the Internet resources in the sphere of cultural properties, valorising the scientific and cultural production of the institutions and improving their impact on the public, including that of works that are either little-known or out of print.
