Electronic and Digital Resuorces

This communication will present current and future perspectives of research in the field of the digital humanities applied to early printed editions and Latin and Neo-Latin texts.

ORGANIZER

PAOLA TOMÈ, Univ. of Oxford, “Marie Curie” Fellow (September 2015 – August 2017); Ca’ Foscari Univ. of Venice : www.unive.it/persone/paola.tome  https://unive.academia.edu/PaolaTomè

La Biblioteca italiana telematica è nata nel 1997 come progetto di ricerca interuniversitario d'interesse nazionale, finalizzato a rendere disponibili i testi della cultura italiana in formato digitale attraverso il lavoro di una ventina di gruppi di ricerca, in diversi settori disciplinari, di quindici università consorziate nel CiBit (Centro interuniversitario Biblioteca italiana telematica), con sede a Pisa.
La BIT è una biblioteca digitale di testi della cultura italiana dal Medioevo al Novecento, prevalentemente ma non esclusivamente letterari, "di origine controllata", ossia digitalizzati, codificati e riveduti da équipes specializzate e seguendo precisi criteri filologici, organizzati all'interno di un'architettura biblioteconomica coerente con gli standard bibliografici e catalografici accettati a livello nazionale e internazionale.
L'analisi e la sperimentazione degli aspetti biblioteconomici e, più in particolare della struttura catalografica della BIT, sono stati affidati a una delle Unità di ricerca dell'Università di Pisa, coordinata da A. Petrucciani, insieme al compito di contribuire all'acquisizione dei testi con una selezione di opere "classiche" della bibliografia, biblioteconomia e bibliologia italiana dal Settecento alla metà del Novecento.
Nella prima fase del progetto, grazie alla collaborazione con l'Istituto di linguistica computazionale del CNR di Pisa, è stato utilizzato il programma DBT (Data base testuale) sviluppato da Eugenio Picchi in versione Applet Java; parallelamente è stato elaborato un programma di conversione automatica della marcatura DBT nella marcatura SGML/TEI.
Il sito della Biblioteca italiana telematica è stato consultabile fino all'autunno 2002 con queste modalità all'indirizzo <http://cibit.humnet.unipi.it>; tra il 1997 e il 2002 si è scelto di riconsiderare la struttura della BIT e si è optato per l'abbandono del software DBT e della relativa codifica a favore di un nuovo sito con migliori funzionalità, accessibile da maggio 2003 (<http://dante.di.unipi.it/ricerca/>), e dell'adozione della codifica XML/TEI.
Ci si è resi conto, d'altra parte, della necessità di disporre di un moderno e potente sistema di gestione bibliotecaria che utilizzasse un formato standard (UNIMARC) in grado di superare i limiti di un motore di ricerca o di un'applicazione ad hoc, tipiche della maggior parte delle "biblioteche digitali", e coerente con un elemento qualificante del progetto complessivo, l'adozione di standard biblioteconomici riconosciuti.

The Italian Telematic Library (Biblioteca Italiana Telematica, BIT) came into being in 1997 as an inter-university research project of national interest. Its aim was to make texts of Italian culture available in digital form through the work of about twenty research groups, in different subject fields, of fifteen universities, who had formed the CiBit consortium (Interuniversity Centre for the Italian Telematic Library), with headquarters in Pisa. The BIT is a digital library of texts of Italian culture that date from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. They are mainly literary texts “of controlled origin”.
This means that they are digitized, marked up and controlled by specialized teams following strict philological criteria, organized within a coherent library architecture with bibliographical and cataloguing standards that are accepted at national and international level. The analysis and implementation of library features and, more specifically, of the catalogue structure of the BIT have been entrusted to one of the research units of the University of Pisa, coordinated by A. Petrucciani. The unit was also responsible for the digitization of a selection of “classical” works of Italian bibliography and librarianship from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century. Thanks to cooperation with the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the National Research Council (CNR) of Pisa, the DBT (Textual Data Base) programme developed by Eugenio Picchi in the Applet Java version was used in the first stage of the project; for the sake of standardization a software program for the automatic conversion of the DBT coding into SGML/TEI markup was written and tested. The Web site of the Italian Telematic Library with DBT software was accessible until the Autumn of 2002 at the URL <http://cibit.humnet.unipi.it>. However, in 2002 the structure of the site was reconsidered in the light of recent developments and it was agreed to change from the DBT software and markup to newer and better options. The new site is accessible since May 2003 at the URL <http:// dante.di.unipi.it/ricerca/>, with a search engine of new conception developed at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. It was also decided to adopt the XML/TEI markup. Moreover, for the catalogue functions of the BIT (identification and selection of one or more texts with given characteristics, e.g. type, genre, period, etc.) it was realized that there was a need for a modern and powerful library system that would use a standard format (UNIMARC) and that would be able to overcome the limits of a search engine or of an ad hoc database application, typical of most “digital libraries”. The choice of a standard format for bibliographic data is seen as a qualifying element of the BIT programme.

BACKGROUND: Funders of medical research the world over are increasingly seeking, in research assessment, to complement traditional output measures of scientific publications with more outcome-based indicators of societal and economic impact. In the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) developed proposals for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to allocate public research funding to higher education institutions, inter alia, on the basis of the social and economic impact of their research. In 2010, it conducted a pilot exercise to test these proposals and refine impact indicators and criteria.
METHODS: The impact indicators proposed in the 2010 REF impact pilot exercise are critically reviewed and appraised using insights from the relevant literature and empirical data collected for the University of Oxford's REF pilot submission in clinical medicine. The empirical data were gathered from existing administrative sources and an online administrative survey carried out by the university's Medical Sciences Division among 289 clinical medicine faculty members (48.1% response rate).
RESULTS: The feasibility and scope of measuring research impact in clinical medicine in a given university are assessed. Twenty impact indicators from seven categories proposed by HEFCE are presented; their strengths and limitations are discussed using insights from the relevant biomedical and research policy literature.
CONCLUSIONS: While the 2010 pilot exercise has confirmed that the majority of the proposed indicators have some validity, there are significant challenges in operationalising and measuring these indicators reliably, as well as in comparing evidence of research impact across different cases in a standardised manner. It is suggested that the public funding agencies, medical research charities, universities, and the wider medical research community work together to develop more robust methodologies for capturing and describing impact, including more valid and reliable impact indicators.