OrienTales is the new digital library managed by the University Library System and the Historical Archive of the University of Naples “L’Orientale.”

The project aims at the creation, enhancement, promotion, dissemination, and long-term preservation of digital objects and collections, making them available on the platform under Creative Commons licenses. The digitized cultural heritage comes from the University’s collections as well as from those of other institutions that have joined the project.

OrienTales represents the evolution of a previous digitization initiative that began in a nearly pioneering way in 2008 with the digital library DigitUno. Its open-source data display platform, Omeka, will be discontinued once all its content has been migrated to OrienTales.

The project has produced a substantial number of digitized volumes in compliance with national digitization standards. A large part of these items will be subject to recovery, provided that they meet the minimum requirements established by the new digitization standards set out in the National Digitization Plan (PND).

The digital library uses the DSpace platform, a functional and flexible open-source software already widely adopted internationally by numerous libraries, archives, museums, and scholars to publish their digitized collections, and which complies with international standards for bibliographic description and the representation of digital objects.