Salesian Digital Library Relaunched

Salesian Digital Library Relaunched

(ANS – Rome – January 22, 2021) – In 2006, Fr. Tarcisio Scaramussa, general councilor for communications at the time (now bishop of Santos, Brazil), started a project for the digital preservation of Salesian materials. Fifteen years later, the principles that were established then have proved their permanent validity and the site, known as the Salesian Digital Library - or SDL - was recently relaunched, thanks to work that renewed the site’s visual presentation, updated the underlying software, and significantly expanded the contents: currently there are over 200,000 resources, in a broad sense, but their number is potentially infinite!

Among the principles established for this work are the following:

• The software has to be open-source, so that it is never subject to proprietary limits;

• Bit-level preservation of all digital objects has to be ensured to keep the original files intact;

• It is necessary to ensure that authenticity and sources were maintained;

• It is necessary to ensure adequate retention of information;

• The site has to be an institutional site, so that its existence is guaranteed by the Congregation itself.

The underlying software (known as Greenstone Digital Library Software) has been and continues to be developed and distributed with the collaboration of UNESCO and the NGO Human Info.

The SDL’s most recent update (late 2020) has been enriched by an excellent and complete search engine, which allows the user to find easily any word, phrase, or paragraph, in both the title and the contents of any document present. If, for example, one were to go to the collection of the issues of the Salesian Bulletin (under the main heading “Salesianity”), then every word becomes searchable in all the individual issues from the first edition of Don Bosco in 1877 to the most recent in 2020!

The navigation process has also been greatly improved, making it more intuitive, in six languages, and by groups, and the graphic design is also more user-friendly. In general terms, the site is presented in the six main languages ​​of the Congregation, but the language, script, and digital format of its contents are potentially unlimited.

The new SDL presents the user with six large icons of main headings (Don Bosco, Salesianity, Salesian Holiness, World Level, Multimedia, Headquarters). Each heading then provides access to the collections – up to now 43 collections, each containing thousands of digital objects: texts, images, audio, video.

The new SDL was presented on January 22 to the general council of the Congregation by the administrator of the sdb.org site, Bro. Hilario Seo, SDB. The official launch will take place on January 24, the feastday of St. Francis de Sales.

You can reach the new SDL from sdb.org (in the “Resources” section of the top menu of www.sdb.org) or directly at: http://sdl.sdb.org

With this relaunch of SDL, the Department of Social Communication hopes to be able to give a strong impulse for the Salesians to take a step forward in the digital transformation, or to digitize objects and save digital materials in a shared way, to facilitate the creation of new resources through shared digital work.