Knowledge Isles in an Open Access World: The Open Archipelago Project

Every culture has been characterized by the system for transferring and to reproduce knowledge between generations. Every change or improvement in learning procedures and in learning environment means an empowerment of the whole amount of knowledge that belongs to the society. Create communities means expand knowledge. Libraries are the traditional depot of culture and knowledge. The concept of digital libraries (D-Lib) emerged consistently with the growth of the web society and the broader diffusion of ICT systems and services. This idea empowers both the as-pects of traditional editorial products and the way of conceiving digital education: on the one hand it implies a transformation in the cultural heritage of libraries, increas-ing the presence of digital contents; on the other hand it shifts the habitual approach to knowledge by offering a more sustainable distribution, a fastest access and a different user-centered concept to better satisfy the needs of the people. In recent years there has been some important changes in the way to access to digital resources on three trends: growth of online access to resources, development of paper-less reading devices, open culture diffusion. This last trend has been crossed the boundaries of the software development world, the Open Source movement, and has involved the production of cultural contents through the deployment of a lot of types of free licenses, such as Creative Commons. Considering this scenario, the paper would present the project Open Archipel-ago (OA) as a final delivery of a set of research activities oriented to offer an open source framework to innovate some aspects of fruition, distribution and management of editorial contents in libraries and in academic environments. The project offers to the users, researchers and students, a different cognitive approach to a wide variety of electronic materials and a more sustainable way to distribute, share and organize knowledge especially in the public spaces of libraries, research centers and universities. Open Archipelago is based on a open source central system to index and to catalogue (and to store in particular cases) Open Access materials, like digital versions of magazines, papers, books, etc. Connected to this main platform are different end-user platforms called “islands” (clustered platforms as "islands" that creates the "archipelago"), in which such materials can be distributed through different typologies of devices (iPads, e-book readers, multimedia cards, USB keys, etc.) or consulted directly "on screen" (multimedia tactile screen) and partially printed according to the policies of the materials and of the hosting institution. The main idea behind this kind of network is to create an “archipelago” of platforms (kiosks with different features) to put each user in a participative, interac-tive and immersive environment based on digital contents and to empower the herit-age of the knowledge encouraging the institutions to adopt and to distribute Open Access products with web 2.0 frameworks. Open Archipelago has the aim to create a community of librarian that de-velops a directory of well profiled resources. In this way we want to stimulate the cooperation between two communities: researchers and librarians. The OA system of platforms allows also to follow specific design guidelines in order to offer a low-cost, sustainable, scalable and modular solution to implement a system based on new low-consumption devices, on online-trusted Open Access re-sources and on self-automated settings of distribution based on new web 2.0 technologies. The research focus started analyzing the issues related to the different ap-proaches between digital natives and digital migrant in specific environments which offer editorial contents. One of the main topics that emerged was how to re-modulate the social inclusion for both these categories in the academic context giving a power-ful and affordable solution in the hand of the institution. After a grounded analysis based on virtual ethnography research and on-field surveys and interviews, emerged mostly the aspect to reframe the practices to approach resources, not only in relation to the actual systems which offer the main index or/and an overall resume, but to access directly the whole content in few steps. The answer to these feedbacks, taking also into account the need not to overlap with the best practices in the international context, was to design a framework oriented towards a methodological and structural innovation in the field of D-Lib cultural heritage based on well-profiled Open Access resources.