Archives on the Web and Users Expectations: Towards a Convergence with Digital Libraries

Digital environments aimed at offering services on historical archives should put together domain standards with typical features of digital libraries. The current tendency is often to adopt two separated methodological approaches: standards-compliant archival descriptions (multi-level, multiple-relations based, providing access just by provenance expressed by original titles, material-centric, careless of the interoperability with general search engines), or digital technologies (horizontal, providing access by subject, sensitive to the “aboutness”, user-centric, focused on item-level descriptions based on Dublin Core-like models). Some issues are coming more and more to surface: how could a web archival environment face users expectations and what content (and how) may be offered to cultural aggregators? How can move archives on line from the plain delivery of cultural information to the facilitation of a cultural experience? This paper examines most of those issues, the necessary difference between input and output to ensure high quality contents, the upside-down changing role of the professional mediation, the peculiarities of web displays for archival descriptions. Moreover, studies of end-users are crucial to guarantee the profitable investment, although the first purpose of the investment should be end-users’ satisfaction. The authors look into those topics by reviewing the international state of the art, and in light of their coordination of a huge user study project as well. It was launched in order to test the prototype of Una Città per gli Archivi, a portal disseminating the results of a several-year project of preservation and valorization of documentary funds of the city of Bologna (Italy). Besides paper archives, the project included photographic and graphic materials, sound and audiovisual recordings.