The possibility of indefinitely reproducing digital contents (books, photos, music etc.) and of sending them anywhere with no significant expenses is a great tool for the achievement of an ideal situation of culture available to everyone. The project “Open Alexandria” is intended to develop a new strategy for the realisation of this possibility.  The starting point for this project is an open source platform (repository) for the creation and management of digital media libraries, characterised by a very simple installation and a sophisticated way of harvesting the metadata (OAI-PMH model). The final goal is to offer the international community a good tool for the valorisation of the digital cultural heritage: movies, literature, research projects, music, visual art, scientific archives.  Everything will be organised according to strict standard criteria, but nonetheless in a catchy and easily manageable fashion, in such a way that its installation will be appealing also for private or public structures with fewer resources. Differently from other existing open archives, in the management of textual contents, this platform will allow for the integration (but also for an independent management) of:

  • Text-oriented digitalisation (enriched with TEI scores created with collaborative tools);
  • Image-oriented digitalisation (with different levels of detailed visualisation)
  • Distributed proofreading (2.0 web technologies that allow for an accurate reconstruction of the original file even at long distances);
  • Access management (with constraints for the visualisation of contents subject to copyright);
  • Social tagging (a classification of the contents created by the users) at different levels.

Furthermore, the platform is intended to give way to the community tools, promoting not only the cultural side of its contents, but also their function in creating interest groups, allowing confrontation and sharing of material. 

Development strategies

The project is based on the most promising development strategy that has been designed in the last few years and that has been adopted by the open source softwares and by cultural projects as Wikipedia or Liber Liber.  This strategy relies on the acquisition of user’s consent, and the contribution by a vast scientific community. A working group is already at work, building an international network of societies and public or private organisations that are interested in Open Alexandria.

Expected benefits

Amongst the major benefits that this platform is planning in achieving, the most relevant one is the possibility of an integrated access to a variety of documents of different nature and form, but also the possibility to assembly and re-use in different contexts the material available on the platform. As an example, it is possible to hypothesize a potential application of the platform in the educational field, by providing this tool to the great number of teachers and students at different levels of school as well as university who are interested in recovering or building educational programs or material to be used in the preparation of lessons, reviews or thesis. A possible application of this platform in this sense could achieve favourable results if used in collaboration with other entities (Ministry of Public Education, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, RAI Teche and RAI Educational, libraries, schools, media-libraries etc.) that have a vast quantity of digital documents and learning objects at their disposal.