The General Directorate for Digitalisation and Communication of the Italian Ministry of Culture has approved acollaboration agreement with the University of Salerno as part of the cooperation programme with the I.PaC Infrastructure (Infrastructure and Digital Services for Cultural Heritage), established under Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP).
The initiative forms part of Mission 1 of the NRRP – Digitalisation, Innovation, Competitiveness, Culture and Tourism, Investment 1.1 Digital Strategies and Platforms for Cultural Heritage, Sub-investment 1.1.4, dedicated to the development of the national digital infrastructure for cultural heritage. Through the Digital Library, the General Directorate is promoting the implementation of I.PaC, the technological backbone of the Ecomic digital ecosystem for culture, designed to host digitised cultural heritage and provide advanced services for interoperability, data integration, enrichment and enhancement.
The University of Salerno's information system, in accordance with the terms of the public call issued by the Ministry of Culture, will be federated with I.PaC. The agreement will enable the University to upgrade its technological systems so that they can interact with the national infrastructure, contributing to the development of an increasingly integrated and interoperable digital ecosystem.
The objective pursued by the General Directorate for Digitalisation and Communication is to overcome the fragmentation of Italy's cultural heritage information systems, fostering connections between museums, archives, libraries, universities and other cultural institutions through the digital ecosystem for culture Ecomic, the network of networks of Italy's digital cultural heritage.
Ecomic connects information systems through I.PaC, without replacing or standardising them. Each system remains autonomous, retaining its own identity and control over its own data. By joining the network, data and resources can interact with those coming from other territories and cultural domains. A work can be linked to its author, a document to the places and events it describes, a collection to other testimonies preserved elsewhere.
In this way, distinct heritage assets become part of a shared body of knowledge that grows richer, more accessible and ready to be explored, reused and turned into new services. In this sense Ecomic is the network of networks, an ecosystem of autonomous systems in which every connection increases the value of the resources and contributes to building a shared cultural knowledge base.
By cooperating with the shared infrastructure, each institution will obtain more accessible, interoperable and reusable data, thereby supporting research, innovation and the development of new digital services for citizens, scholars and professionals in the cultural sector.
With the approval of the agreement with the University of Salerno, the General Directorate for Digitalisation and Communication continues to implement the national strategy for the digital transformation of cultural heritage, strengthening cooperation between public authorities and academic institutions in pursuit of the objectives set out in the NRRP.