Internet Culturale - catalogues and digital collections from Italian libraries is the portal providing access to the heritage held by Italian public libraries and important cultural institutions.
It is a multimedia web tool that allows both bibliographic information and the digital library to be viewed in the same virtual place. It provides thorough analysis of cultural issues through multimedia resources (itineraries, exhibitions, authors and works, 3D programmes) devoted to literature, science, art and music. It aggregates and makes available the results of the work of the library community and acts as a reference point for all stakeholders within the library sector. Internet Culturale promotes the knowledge, enhancement and use of the holdings of Italian libraries and cultural and research institutes, meeting the needs of a diversified array of users of different ages, training backgrounds and interests. It is an indispensable tool for students and researchers.

Internet Culturale is engineered  with widely-used, certified open source products (Lucene and SOLR) and the querying of data is ensured by a high-performance search engine (0.2 seconds response times relating to the current 20 million data points) providing prompt and shared Google like access to users.

The interface provides users with a response covering the whole catalogue system, including OPAC SBN, Manusonline, Edit16, historical catalogues, the Digital Library and the website; faceted browsing allows to filter results in order to obtain a more precise response; users can only select the Digital Library, as well as the Site only. The search engine queries the Internet CulturaleMetaIndex, accomplished through a data extraction process from the original databases, a content and uniforming creation system with a shared profile based on the Dublin Core standards qualified with the necessary extensions, and finally the data updating and optimization in the search engine Indexes.
By indexing the MAG descriptive metadata, the Digital Library is able to ensure an improved detail of responses. Indeed, the search engine exploits the presence of ontologies for the semantic expansion of queries and the automatic or semi-automatic identification of related terms (statistical algorithms identifying similarities among keywords existing in the MAG), and proposing suggestions within the detailed template associated with the selected object.
 
Watch the Internet Culturale tutorial video (in Italian).
 
For more information on the history of the project, see

Internet Culturale ensures visibility on CulturaItalia through the mapping of its data applying Pico.

For more information: Egidio Incelli