CiBIT: Biblioteca Italiana Telematica A Digital Library for the Italian Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The primary objective of the CiBIT digital library is the widest possible diffusion of information on Italian art, literature and history. The aim of CiBIT is to allow scholars and other interested users throughout the world to access and study multimedia documentation (voice and image data are also included) containing all kinds of information on and describing different aspects of Italian culture. The following main areas of artistic and cultural interest are covered: philology, literature, linguistics, medieval and modern history, legal history, musicology.

The intention is to make the CiBIT service available to students and scholars in university libraries and research institutes, in the first place, but also in libraries serving the general public. Main aims of the project are to allow users throughout the world (through Internet) to access and consult Italian cultural data, and to provide them with a series of sophisticated tools to process and analyse the textual material in various ways.

The CiBIT query system, which is based on that of the DBT system1, has been completely developed in JAVA so that it can be used by all existing WEB browsers and can operate on all kinds of hardware and software platforms. Java applets have been implemented to provide the same level of functionality as the stand-alone DBT system. A multiserver middleware engine automatically selects the best host site depending on the particular requirements of a given query. The CiBIT digital library can be accessed through the consultation of a single text, of a set of texts, or of an entire corpus. Relevant subsets of texts in a corpus can be defined dynamically using the bibliographic data associated with the texts.