Archives on the web and users expectations: towards a convergence with digital libraries

The building digital environments aimed at offering services and information around archives should reach the goal of putting together archival standards and schemes with the typical features of digital libraries. Today the increasing landing of archives on the Web is forcing a comparison with the model of digital library, highlighting some issues: how could a web archival environment may face users expectations, what content (and how) may be offered to aggregators (portals and web agents), how may we ensure its quality? The paper deals with all these issues, based on the authors experiences and mostly on the recent user study testing activities launched for the prototype of Una Città per gli Archivi, a portal disseminating the results of a several years project of research and valorization of documentary funds of the city of Bologna (Italy), including photographic and graphic materials, sound and audiovisual recordings, in addition to paper archives.