Digital Scholarship Innovation and Digital Libraries: A Survey in Italy

A profound change is happening in the world of scholarly communication, where the object of scientific communication is no longer a linear text, although digital, but a networked digital object-centered that consists of text, data, images, videos, blogs. This is stimulating the innovation of scholarly communication workflow also called "Digital scholarship". This change is likely to deeply modify the nature and the role of digital libraries and their relationship with the national research platforms (CRIS), thematic data center and other stakeholders. The paper presents the findings of a survey about the needs and practices of scholars in Italy, as part of the international Project 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication. The impact of digital scholarship on digital libraries has to be understood and the digital libraries' mission could be that of how different knowledge representations could be combined, queried, stored and re-used, in virtual collaborative spaces.