From 29 June, at the address https://edl.beniculturali.it, the new platform is available to everyone "Estense Digital Library”, from which, not only researchers and scholars, but also students and the simple curious, can make searches starting from keywords. This is an innovative digital library project created by the Galleria Estensi, i.e. the important museum located in Modena which houses the great humanistic and Renaissance collection that belonged to the D'Este family who ruled the duchy of Ferrara and then that of Modena and Reggio.
This is the first Italian example of a "participatory" digital platform thanks to the use of an innovative technology - already in use in the most important libraries in the world - IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) which allows the display, navigation and management of digitized images in a method never before experienced.
The first digitized portion of the Estense Library's heritage - the one already online - corresponds to about 700 thousand pages from an immense heritage of ancient books, maps, musical scores, manuscripts and writings by great authors of the past, including Ludovico Antonio Muratori, one of the founding fathers of Italian historiography. Not only. Within this first initial "corpus", there are also hidden treasures and absolute rarities such as the "Bible of Borso d'Este", one of the most valuable examples of Renaissance illumination, and the "Planisphere Catino" or Map of the world: a unique document showing the geographical knowledge of the Portuguese Empire at the beginning of the 1500th century including the newly discovered (in XNUMX) Brazilian coast by Cabral.
The very high resolution display of searchable documents on the website of the "Estense Digital Library” is just one of the marvels made possible by that formidable technological tool that is the IIIF. In fact, the images viewed - after registering - also become editable with photoediting tools, with the possibility of creating "own stories", sharing lists of works, posting works or details on one's social channels.
Furthermore, the possibility of approaching a digitized cultural heritage in an absolutely new way offers new opportunities to scholars: in particular, that of comparing their works being studied online with others always coming from platforms that use IIIF: for example re- "virtually" assembling dismembered works such as ancient manuscripts, but also inserting shareable information content on the documents examined using the "annotation" function.
Finally, a further innovative aspect is in the idea of "participatory platform", ie in the concept of crowdsourcing applied to the development of the digital library. The open approach (open data) of the project aims, in fact, to encourage the active participation of platform users. Again thanks to the applications made possible by IIIF technology, scholars and enthusiasts will be able to contribute to the enrichment of the cultural heritage by sending reports to the address ga-esten@beniculturali.it. both with their own transcriptions, descriptions and links, also making use of the "increased possibilities" of reciprocal contribution.
