The General Directorate for Digitalisation and Communication and the Central Institute for the Digitalisation of Cultural Heritage - Digital Library of the italian Ministry of Culture present D.PaC - Digitisation for Cultural Heritage, the platform within Ecomic, the Digital Ecosystem for Culture, that makes the digitisation of Italian cultural heritage a structured, measurable and nationally replicable process.
D.PaC represents one of the Ministry of Culture's most significant achievements in the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. Developed as part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) sub-investment M1C3 1.1.5, "Digitalisation of Cultural Heritage", the platform has contributed to achieving the target of producing and publishing 75 million digital assets by June 2026.
For the first time, the platform has enabled the coordinated management of a nationwide digitisation programme, involving hundreds of cultural institutions, public administrations and service providers.
Since 2022, D.PaC has supported more than 550 project sites - 529 active and 40 completed - across more than 500 cultural locations, with over 1,000 registered users. The programme has covered a wide range of heritage assets, from archival collections and manuscripts to newspapers and museum objects, digitised using 2D, 3D and ultra-high-resolution technologies. It has also consolidated the adoption of the METS ECO-MiC metadata standard as the national reference framework for digitisation projects.
Organisations launching a digitisation campaign can use D.PaC to design and coordinate digitisation projects, plan activities, produce digital assets compliant with national standards, verify their quality, and monitor progress throughout the project lifecycle. From this digitisation platform, every heritage asset - whether a work of art, a manuscript, an archival photograph, a museum artefact or a cadastral record – is then captured, described, validated and transferred to I.PaC, Ecomic's Digital Infrastructure for Cultural Information Heritage, according to consistent criteria.
Organisations that already hold digital assets can instead describe, archive and align them with national standards, joining the Digital Ecosystem for Culture without the need to invest in dedicated infrastructure.
In both cases, the platform defines roles, responsibilities and project phases, making digitisation processes manageable, traceable and auditable.
Value for Stakeholders
D.PaC delivers value to all stakeholders involved. It provides cultural institutions and public administrations with monitoring and oversight tools; offers organisations without their own information systems a cloud-based environment for managing digital heritage assets; supports service providers through structured workflows; and enables the Ministry of Culture to centrally govern the production of the nation's digital cultural assets.
From Project Site to Ecosystem
D.PaC is part of Ecomic's technological core. In this model, digitisation is not an endpoint but the first step in a complete cycle of enhancement and promotion of Italian cultural heritage.
Services and Access
For information about D.PaC's services and access procedures, please contact the dedicated team at ecomic.comunicazione@cultura.gov.it, or complete the questionnaire available on the website for guidance on the services best suited to your needs: https://ecomic.cultura.gov.it/dpac/..