Searching, Accessing and Using Web Resources: A Chicken-and-Egg Dilemma?

The advent of the Web is said to have changed our behaviours, requiring us to learn brand-new literacy skills. It is worth asking who runs the game, and how. Does the continuous updating of interfaces and information architectures, led mostly by the mobile market, actually meet our needs? Or are our behaviours merely adapting to environmental change? One of the most obvious upheavals concerns the searching vs. browsing attitudes that we typically alternate when looking for information on the Net. The monopoly of search engines has affected the cognitive processes and methodologies of scholars who, as long as they are using digital libraries and other kinds of aggregated resources, partly sacrifice the potentialities of hypertext. How can scholarly communication take on the challenges that Web-based media present?

Pierluigi Feliciati, graduated in History at the University of Rome La Sapienza and specialized in Archival Science and in Information Retrieval Applications, since 2007 is Lecturer and senior Researcher in Records and Information Science at the University of Macerata, where since 2010 is the vice-president for University Information Systems. He is one of the coordinator of the UniMC research network for SSH and ICT and was founder and president of the spin-off company PlayMarche, specialized in ICT apps for Cultural Heritage. Previously, since 1986, he served as an archivist for the Italian National Archives, and was the coordinator of the National Archives web information system. He is Dodson Visiting Professor at the iSchool (Library, Archives and Information Studies) of UBC (Jan-Mar 2019).

His current research focuses on two topics: quality of content and users’ interaction and engagement in the cultural and archival web environments; administrative and conservation metadata for archives life-cycle.