Phaidra, un archivio digitale FAIR per la disseminazione e l’accesso integrato a testi, testimonianze, immagini e storie del patrimonio culturale

Since the end of the Eighties of last century, information technologies have enabled the construction of online library catalogues. The University of Padova has quickly set up a free access catalogue, nowadays with more than 2 million records, including academic libraries and all the cultural institutions of the city. The catalogue has highlighted the historical continuity and the richness of the library heritage, beginning from the origin of the Atheneum in 1222. From the creation of the online catalogue, which participates in the National Library Service, work began on the digitization of book collections and archival and museum collections in order to portray the personalities and developments that pertain to the history of Padova and Sciences. This activity is part of the so-called Third Mission, that is, the set of activities with which universities can directly interact with society in a constant dialogue between the university and citizens. This development required an infrastructure that would guarantee long-term archiving, the description and identification of digital objects, public access from a web interface, with simple and advanced research, terms of use and licensing models for digital objects. In 2010, the University Library System, after careful analysis, chose Phaidra, the repository with FAIR features developed originally by the University of Vienna on Fedora open source software. The platform Phaidra currently hosts 400.000 digital objects within the GLAM framework. During these almost ten years of work, Phaidra has been enriched with useful tools to favour the dissemination and reuse of the deposited resources (for example, Book Viewer, Collection Viewer, Image and API Viewer) and has also constantly researched and activated dialogue with other platforms, such as Europeana and Internet Archive, and software systems, such as Movio, the ICCU open source kit for creating virtual exhibitions.