This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 12th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL 2016, held in Firence, Italy, in February 2016. The 15 papers presented were carefully selected from 23 submissions and cover topics such as formal methods, long-term preservation, metadata creation, management and curation, multimedia, ontology and linked data. The papers deal with numerous multidisciplinary aspects ranging from computer science to humanities in the broader sense, including research areas such as archival and library information sciences; information management systems; semantic technologies; information retrieval; new knowledge environments.

The research domains information retrieval and information visualization have always been independent from each other. However, they have the potential to be mutually beneficial. With this in mind, a writer school was organized in Zinal, Switzerland, in January 2012, within the context of the EU-funded research project PROMISE (Participative Research Laboratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation). PROMISE aims at advancing the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to support individuals, commercial entities, and communities who design, develop, employ, and improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE is to deliver a unified environment collecting data, knowledge, tools, and methodologies, and to help the user community involved in experimental evaluation.

This book constitutes the outcome of the PROMISE Winter School 2012 and contains 11 invited lectures from the research domains information retrieval and information visualization. A large variety of subjects are covered, including hot topics such as crowdsourcing and social media.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, held in Bari, Italy, in February 2012. The 22 full papers, included together with 4 panel papers, were selected from extended versions of the presentations given at the conference, following an additional round of reviewing and revision after the event. The topics covered are as follows: legacy documents and cultural heritage; systems interoperability and data integration; formal and methodological foundations of digital libraries; semantic web and linked data for digital libraries; multilingual information access; digital library infrastructures; metadata creation and management; search engines for digital library systems; evaluation and log data; handling audio/visual and non-traditional objects; user interfaces and visualization; digital library quality; policies and copyright issues in digital libraries; scientific data curation, citation and scholarly publication, user behavior and modeling; and preservation and curation.

Information Retrieval (IR) has concentrated on the development of information management systems to support user retrieval from large collections of homogeneous textual material. A variety of approaches have been tried and tested with varying degrees of success over many decades of research. Hypertext (HT) systems, on the other hand, provide a retrieval paradigm based on browsing through a structured information space, following pre-defined connections between information fragments until an information need is satisfied, or appears to be. Information Retrieval and Hypertext addresses the confluence of the areas of IR and HT and explores the work done to date in applying techniques from one area, to the other leading to the development of hypertext information retrieval' (HIR) systems. An important aspect of the work in IR/HT and in any user-centred information system is the emergence of multimedia information and such multimedia information is treated as an integral information type in this text. The contributed chapters cover the development of integrated hypertext information retrieval models, and the application of IR and HT techniques in hypertext construction and the approaches that can be taken in searching HIR systems. These chapters are complemented by two overview chapters covering, respectively, information retrieval and hypertext research and developments. Information Retrieval and Hypertext is important as it is the first text to directly address the combined searching/browsing paradigm of information discovery which is becoming so important in modern computing environments. It will be of interest to researchers and professionals working in a range of areas related to information discovery.

Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information based on its semantic content. The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, among a large collection containing the information sought, satisfying a user's information need usually expressed in a natural language query. Documents may be objects or items in any medium: text, image, audio, or indeed a mixture of all three. This book presents 12 revised lectures given at the Third European Summer School in Information Retrieval, ESSIR 2000, held at the Villa Monastero, Varenna, Italy, in September 2000. The first part of the book is devoted to the foundation of IR and related areas; the second part on advanced topics addresses various current issues, from usability aspects to Web searching and browsing.

Information Retrieval (IR) has concentrated on the development of information management systems to support user retrieval from large collections of homogeneous textual material. A variety of approaches have been tried and tested with varying degrees of success over many decades of research. Hypertext (HT) systems, on the other hand, provide a retrieval paradigm based on browsing through a structured information space, following pre-defined connections between information fragments until an information need is satisfied, or appears to be. Information Retrieval and Hypertext addresses the confluence of the areas of IR and HT and explores the work done to date in applying techniques from one area, to the other leading to the development of hypertext information retrieval' (HIR) systems. An important aspect of the work in IR/HT and in any user-centred information system is the emergence of multimedia information and such multimedia information is treated as an integral information type in this text. The contributed chapters cover the development of integrated hypertext information retrieval models, and the application of IR and HT techniques in hypertext construction and the approaches that can be taken in searching HIR systems. These chapters are complemented by two overview chapters covering, respectively, information retrieval and hypertext research and developments. Information Retrieval and Hypertext is important as it is the first text to directly address the combined searching/browsing paradigm of information discovery which is becoming so important in modern computing environments. It will be of interest to researchers and professionals working in a range of areas related to information discovery.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries held in Pisa, Italy, in January 2011. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and cover topics of interest such as system interoperability and data integration; formal and methodological foundations of digital libraries; semantic web and linked data for digital libraries; multilingual information access; digital library infrastructures; metadata creation and management; search engines for digital library systems; evaluation and log data; handling audio/visual and non-traditional objects; user interfaces and visualization; digital library quality.

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua has been a major contributor to information retrieval (IR) and digital libraries. The papers in this book include coverage of automated text categorizations, web link analysis algorithms, retrieval in multimedia digital libraries, and multilingual information retrieval. The text will appeal to institutions and companies working on search engines and information retrieval algorithms.

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua has been a major contributor to information retrieval (IR) and digital libraries. The papers in this book include coverage of automated text categorizations, web link analysis algorithms, retrieval in multimedia digital libraries, and multilingual information retrieval. The text will appeal to institutions and companies working on search engines and information retrieval algorithms.