About IRCDL 2025
Since 2005, the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL) has been an annual event for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics. IRCDL has become a key forum on digital libraries and associated issues. It covers various aspects, including new forms of information institutions, digital content management, and theoretical models of information media. The conference welcomes participants from academia, government, industry, and other sectors. It draws from diverse research areas such as computer science, digital humanities, information science, librarianship, archival science, museum studies, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage, and humanities. This year's conference features two tracks: one on Computer Science Foundations for Digital Libraries, and another focused on Digital Humanities. IRCDL is partially supported by the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics and the Department Strategic Plan (PSD - Interdepartmental Project on Artificial Intelligence - 2020-25) of the University of Udine.
Proceedings Now Available!
The conference proceedings have been published on CEUR-WS. Explore the latest research contributions from our authors.
Submissions are welcome concerning theory, architectures, data models, tools, services, infrastructures. A list of possible topics (but not limited to) for the conference is the following:
- Open data
- Open science: models, practices, mandates, and policies
- Information retrieval and access
- Information extraction from tables and figures in scientific literature
- Application of machine learning techniques to research data and digital libraries
- Ontologies
- Knowledge discovery and representation in digital libraries
- Knowledge acquisition from scientific papers
- Document analysis (layout, text, images)
- Services for digital arts and humanities
- Cultural heritage access and analysis
- Metadata (definition, management, curation, integration)
- Digital manuscript analysis
- Data repositories and archives
- Data citation, provenance and pricing
- Data and information lifecycle (creation, store, share and reuse)
- Semantic web technologies and linked data for DLs
- Digital epigraphy
- Digital preservation and curation
- Quality and evaluation of digital libraries
- Digital Scholarship
- Citation analysis and scientometrics
- Research infrastructures
- User participation
- Human-computer interaction and user experience
- Applications of digital libraries
- Multi-media handling
Tracks
The 21st Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science will feature two different tracks:
Track 1
Computer Science Foundations for Digital Libraries: Algorithms, Systems, and Applications
This track examines core computer science concepts essential for digital libraries. It covers algorithms for information retrieval and data management, system architectures for large-scale digital collections, and practical applications in areas such as academic research and cultural heritage preservation.
Special Issue
Published in International Journal on Digital Libraries.
Track 2
Digital Humanities: The Science and Foundation of Modern Humanities Libraries
This track explores the intersection of digital technologies and humanities research. It examines computational methods for analyzing and preserving cultural artifacts, text mining techniques for large-scale literary analysis, and digital platforms for collaborative scholarship.
Special Issue
Published in Umanistica Digitale.
Special Issues
"International Journal on Digital Libraries" Special Issue on Computer Science for Digital Libraries
The International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL) announces a special issue titled "An Outlook on Computer Science for Digital Libraries: Algorithms, Systems, and
Applications", tied to the IRCDL 2025 conference. This issue highlights critical computer science principles transforming digital libraries, from document engineering
and algorithms to applications in academic research and cultural heritage.
The selection of the best papers from the IRCDL conference will be invited to submit an extended version for the special issue.
Submission Details:
- Types of Contributions:
- Extended versions of conference papers
- Other contributions aligning with the theme
- Paper Submission: April 15, 2025
- 1st Review Round: July 15, 2025
- Final Review Round: October 15, 2025
- Publication: December 15, 2025
"Umanistica Digitale" Special Issue on Digital Humanities and AI
The journal Umanistica Digitale is pleased to announce a special issue on the intersection of Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence, organized in conjunction
with the 21st IRCDL Conference.
This special issue will focus on innovative applications within digital libraries and cultural heritage.
The selection of the best papers from the IRCDL conference will be invited to submit an extended version for the special issue.
Submission Details:
- Types of Contributions:
- Articles (5,000-10,000 words)
- Reviews and Reports (1,000-3,500 words)
- Submission Deadline: April 15, 2025
- Expected Publication Date: Late 2025
Submissions
Research papers, describing original ideas on the listed topics and on other fundamental aspects of digital libraries and technology, are solicited. Moreover, short papers on early research results, new results on previously published works, and extended abstract on previously published works are also welcome:
- Research papers: should be in the 10-12 pages range.
- Short papers: should be in the 6-7 pages range.
- Extended abstracts: should be 5 pages long.
For all the submission types the references are not counted in the page limit.
Submissions of research papers must be in English, single blind, in PDF format in the CEURART single-column format available either at Overleaf website or CEUR-WS repository (for the offline version):
- Overleaf template
- ⚠️ Due to recent changes in Overleaf's policy, a paid account may now be required to compile this template. It is recommended to check and, if necessary, use a local LaTeX setup.
- CEUR.WS repository (offline version)
- ODT version
The accepted papers will be published in the IRCDL 2025 Proceedings. The Proceedings will be published by CEUR-WS, which is gold open access and indexed by SCOPUS and DBLP.
Submission will be through the submission system at the following link:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IRCDL2025/
This year's conference will be an in-person-only event, and virtual or hybrid options will not be offered.
Important Dates
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59 PM) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone
Deadline extended!
Submission deadline
December 6, 2024
December 19, 2024
Notification of acceptance
January 24, 2025
Camera-ready deadline
February 7, 2025
Conference
February 20-21, 2025
Invited Speakers
Lorenzo Baraldi
Building and Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal LLMs
The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is reshaping the landscape of artificial intelligence, enabling systems to process and reason over both textual and visual inputs. This talk will explore the development and evaluation of a novel retrieval-augmented multimodal LLMs, capable of dynamically integrating external knowledge sources to enhance their reasoning capabilities. Specifically, we will introduce a hierarchical retrieval pipeline, which efficiently retrieves and ranks relevant passages from large-scale knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia, by leveraging vision-language embeddings. Furthermore, we will explore the development of enhanced embedding spaces tailored for cross-modal retrieval, allowing the model to effectively process both text and images in document retrieval scenarios. These advancements hold significant implications for Digital Libraries, where the ability to efficiently search, retrieve, and synthesize multimodal information is critical for knowledge discovery and accessibility. The presentation will also cover trustworthiness and safety concerns in multimodal AI, including methodologies for enhancing the reliability of model outputs. Ultimately, this work paves the way for more intelligent, context-aware, and ethically responsible AI systems for information retrieval and multimodal understanding.
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Since 2024, He is an Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where he works on Deep Learning, Vision-and-Language integration, Large-Scale models and Multimedia. He teaches in the courses of "Computer Vision and Cognitive Systems," Scalable AI, and Computer Architecture. His research interests span various areas, including Vision-and-Language integration, Multimodal Retrieval, Image and Video Captioning, Visual-Semantic alignment, Large-Scale model development, HPC and Embodied AI. He has authored more than 120 publications in international journals and conferences. Currently, he serves as an Associate Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition and acts as an Area Chair for ICCV and major multimedia conferences. He is also a Scholar in the ELLIS society (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems), where he coordinates the Modena ELLIS Unit. Since 2021, He has held the position of deputy director at the Interdepartmental Center on Digital Humanities at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Earlier in his career, in 2017, he worked at the Facebook AI Research laboratory in Paris under the supervision of Hervé Jégou. During that time, he worked on the development of a video-matching algorithm that was adopted in production on the social network to detect abusive content.
Ludovica Galeazzo
Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Venice’s Lagoon Islands in a Digital Environment
Capturing the long-term transformative history of urban environments—particularly those that no longer exist or have been drastically reshaped by human intervention—is a complex undertaking. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when, as with the lagoon islands surrounding Venice, the history is intricately interwoven with the political, defensive, healthcare, and economic narratives of a major capital. Such an endeavour requires not only the meticulous documentation of centuries of urban and architectural changes but also a comprehensive exploration of both the tangible and intangible dimensions of these spaces. Since 2023, the ERC project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) has been developing an online, interactive, and semantic geospatial infrastructure to visually reconstruct the history of these once-thriving lagoon settlements, highlighting both their physical transformations and social dynamics. By integrating geo-referenced 2D and 3D digital reconstructions with research documentation and new survey data, the platform offers a holistic reinterpretation of a dilapidated cultural heritage. This initiative recontextualises the Venetian archipelago’s multifaceted role as a crucial connective fabric for urban practices in early modern Venice, blending past and present through digital innovation.
University of Padova
Ludovica Galeazzo is an Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the Università degli Studi di Padova. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project Venice’s Nissology. Reframing the Lagoon City as an Archipelago (VeNiss) and her research centers on Venetian architecture in the early modern period, with a special interest in using new technologies to demonstrate the process of the city’s change over time. She received her PhD from the Graduate School Ca’ Foscari-Iuav in Venice and was later a Research Fellow at the Università Iuav di Venezia (2013–16), a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University (2016–17), and a Digital Humanities Research Associate at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2019–present). Ludovica is involved in several international projects, including Visualizing Cities, Metapolis, and 3D SEBENICO, and she serves on the editorial boards of the journals Architectural Histories (EAHN) and Tribelon. She has recently been appointed a member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Her publications explore the intersection of architecture, urban studies, social history, and the wide-ranging issue of place-making dynamics. She is the author of the monograph Venezia e i margini urbani. L’insula dei Gesuiti in età moderna (IVSLA 2018) and co-editor of Acqua e cibo a Venezia. Storie della laguna e della città (Marsilio 2015).
Program
Opening
Chair: Prof. Giuseppe Serra
Track 1: Computer Science
Chair: Prof. Giorgio Maria di Nunzio
How to Compress Categorical Variables to Visualize Historical Dynamics
Fabio Celli
Automatic detection of quality problems in archived websites using visual comparisons
Brenda Reyes Ayala
An integrated system for interacting with multi-page scholarly documents
Lorenzo Massai, Simone Marinai
Semantic Digital Libraries in Public Administration: A Knowledge Graph Approach to Certificate Request Management
Valentina Albano, Giovanni Carau, Donatella Firmani, Elio Gullo, Claudia Ilardi, Luigi Laura
Coffee Break
Invited Talk: Prof. Lorenzo Baraldi
Chair: Dott. Alex Falcon
Building and Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal LLMs
Track 2: Digital Humanities
Chair: Dott. Daniel Zilio
Unlocking Music Archives: Openness and Accessibility
Vanessa Faschi, Federico Avanzini, Luca Andrea Ludovico
ATLAS: Towards a knowledge graph of international scholarly research on the Italian Digital Cultural Heritage
Sebastiano Giacomini, Alessia Bardi, Marina Buzzoni, Marilena Daquino, Riccardo Del Gratta, Angelo Mario Del Grosso, Franz Fischer, Chiara Martignano, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Giorgia Rubin and Francesca Tomasi
Knowledge Graphs for the Web Economy: The CHiPS&BITS Project on Cultural Heritage
Stefano Ferilli, Eleonora Bernasconi, Domenico Redavid, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio
Lunch Break
Track 1: Computer Science
Chair: Prof. Stefano Ferilli
A Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph for Mapping Narratives of Cinema’s Divas
Laura Pandolfo, Dario Guidotti, Giorgio Corona
Evaluation of Crowdsourced Peer Review using Synthetic Data and Simulations
Michael Soprano, Eddy Maddalena, Francesca Da Ros, Maria Elena Zuliani, Stefano Mizzaro
Recent Developments in Deep Learning-based Author Name Disambiguation
Francesca Cappelli, Giovanni Colavizza, Silvio Peroni
Enhancing Historical Documents: Deep Learning and Image Processing Approaches
Zahra Ziran, Massimo Mecella, Simone Marinai
Extending Nanopublications with Knowledge Provenance for Multi-Source Scientific Assertions
Fabio Giachelle, Stefano Marchesin, Laura Menotti, Gianmaria Silvello
An Information System for Biblical Manuscripts Paratexts: Modeling, Implementation, and Future Directions
Andrea Brunello, Emanula Colombi, Matteo Raffin, Nicola Saccomanno
Coffee Break
Track 2: Digital Humanities
Chair: Prof. Andrea Brunello
Uncertainty, narrativity, and critical approaches in Digital Humanities information visualisation projects
Tommaso Battisti, Marilena Daquino
Proposing a Comprehensive Dataset for Arabic Script OCR in the context of Digital Libraries and Religious Archives (Extended Abstract)
Riccardo Vigliermo, Giovanni Sullutrone, Sonia Bergamaschi, Luca Sala
Automatic Annotation of Legal References (Allegationes) in the Liber Extra’s Ordinary Gloss
Andrea Esuli, Vincenzo Roberto Imperia, Giovanni Puccetti
Quotes at the fingertips: The BogoSlov project's combined approach towards identification of Biblical material in Old Church Slavonic texts
Martin Ruskov, Tomáš Mikulka, Irina Podtergera, Maxim Gavrilkov, Walker Thompson
REVERINO: REgesta generation VERsus latIN summarizatiOn
Giovanni Puccetti, Laura Righi, Ilaria Sabbatini, Andrea Esuli
Learning the Semantic Web with tools for information visualisation and data storytelling
Giulia Renda, Marilena Daquino
Social Dinner
Track 1: Computer Science
Chair: Dott. Emanuele Di Buccio
A tool for validating and monitoring bibliographic data in open research information systems: the OpenCitations collections
Elia Rizzetto, Silvio Peroni
Bridging the Evaluation Gap: Leveraging Large Language Models for Topic Model Evaluation
Zhiyin Tan, Jennifer D’Souza
AgriMus: Developing Museums in the Metaverse for Agricultural Education
Ali Abdari, Alex Falcon, Giuseppe Serra
Automatic Reviews' Assignments through Answer Set Programming
Davide Di Pierro, Eleonora Bernasconi, Stefano Ferilli
Coffee Break
Invited Talk: Prof. Ludovica Galeazzo
Chair: Prof. Gian Maria Silvello
Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Venice’s Lagoon Islands in a Digital Environment
Track 1: Computer Science
Chair: Prof. Gian Maria Silvello
Exploring few-shot text line segmentation approaches in challenging ancient manuscripts
Silvia Zottin, Axel De Nardin, Giuseppe Branca, Emanuela Colombi, Claudio Piciarelli, Hafsa Shujat, Gian Luca Foresti
Exploring Handwritten Document Collections: An EPSC-Based Approach for Feature Extraction and Similarity Analysis
Anders Hast, Örjan Simonsson
AIGeN-Llama: An Adversarial Approach for Instruction Generation in VLN using Llama2 Model
Niyati Rawal, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Sustainable Tourism EXperience (STEX): an approach to tourism recommendation systems based on sustainability
Daniel Zilio, Nicola Orio, Dai Ngoc Trang Vu
Lunch Break
Tracks: Computer Science & Digital Humanities
Chair: Prof. Stefano Mizzaro
"I’m not sure how feasible capture is'': archivability as a dimension of website quality
Brenda Reyes Ayala
Building an Archive of ELT Materials Used in the 20th Century in Italy: Preliminary Observations
Martin Ruskov, Emanuela Tenca
Benchmarking BERT-based Models for Latin: A Case Study on Biblical References in Ancient Christian Literature
Davide Caffagni, Federico Cocchi, Anna Mambelli, Fabio Tutrone, Marco Zanella, Marcella Cornia, Rita Cucchiara
Digital Maktaba Project: Proposing a Metadata-Driven Framework for Arabic Library Digitization
Amina El Ganadi, Luca Gagliardelli, Sania Aftar, Federico Ruozzi
Exploring Approaches for Measuring Risk in the News
Emanuele Di Buccio, Federico Neresini
The Role of Digital Humanities in the Preservation of Cultural Heritage: The Case of the Sanctuary of Madonna di Carufo
Caterina Ciccotti
Research papers: 20 minutes (15' presentation + 5' discussion)
Short papers: 15 minutes (10' presentation + 5' discussion)
Extended abstracts 15 minutes (10' presentation + 5' discussion)
Organizers
The team behind IRCDL 2025
General Chairs
Stefano Mizzaro
University of Udine
Giuseppe Serra
University of Udine
Program Chairs
Track 1
Computer Science Foundations for Digital Libraries: Algorithms, Systems, and Applications
Donatella Firmani
University of Rome - Sapienza
Sara Tonelli
Fondazione Bruno-Kessler
Track 2
Digital Humanities: The Science and Foundation of Modern Humanities Libraries
Marcella Cornia
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Giorgio Maria di Nunzio
University of Padova
Technical Chairs
Andrea Brunello
University of Udine
Emanuela Colombi
University of Udine
Alessandro Locaputo
University of Udine
Nicola Saccomanno
University of Udine
Publication Chair
Alessandro Tremamunno
University of Udine
Publicity Chairs
Lorenzo Balzotti
University of Rome - Sapienza
Vittorio Cuculo
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Beatrice Portelli
University of Udine
Stefano Marchesin
University of Padova
Website Chair
Michael Soprano
University of Udine
Social Activity Chair
Alex Falcon
University of Udine
Local Organization Chairs
Ali Abdari
University of Udine
Mehdi Fasihi
University of Udine
Ian Gallegos
University of Udine
Social Dinner
In Udine
Join us for an unforgettable evening at our social dinner, held at Casa della Contadinanza in the heart of Udine! Located near the historic castle, this charming venue offers breathtaking views from its open-air setting, overlooking the entire cityscape of Udine. During the dinner, you’ll enjoy delicious local specialties, paired with excellent wine, all while taking in the vibrant atmosphere and stunning scenery.
It’s the perfect opportunity to relax, connect, and savor the best of what Udine has to offer—so make sure to join us!