From Digital Cultural Heritage to Digital Culture: Evolution in Digital Humanities

Abstract

The paper focuses on the need to rethink digital and digitization process for long term digital preservation, aiming to redefine them as the new Cultural Heritage of the contemporary era. This new way to observe digital artifacts and their co-creation process is the indispensable prerequisite for the growth of an aware Digital Culture and for giving due importance to digitization and dematerialisation realized starting by an approach focused on data preservation and, to this goal, on the decisive role that the descriptive metadata play. The case study was the digitization project of the "Historical Archive of the Giuseppe Laterza & Figli Publishing House". In particular, the attention to preservation focused on structuring the schema of metadata and, above all, on descriptive writing, with regard to the choice of tags, elements and attributes, and to draft descriptive information of each digital artifact.