Rethinking Digital Libraries Paradigms: moving Digital Cultural Heritage Collections to DSpace 7/8

The release of DSpace 7 with all the new technologies and features it implements, represents a momentous change, opening up the application to new and broader perspectives. In particular, it makes the product much more attractive to the cultural heritage domain. As a result, several organizations are starting to implement or migrating Digital Libraries to DSpace 7 or to the most recent version 8. Based on 4Science's experience in managing more than twenty DSpace-based Cultural Heritage projects, this contribution aims to present the challenges of starting a Digital Library based on DSpace, both from scratch or migrating data. The presentation will also illustrate how creating a DSpace-based Digital Library can take such applications to the next level, allowing to explore and analyze documents in relation to other documents and to all the information helping to define their context, or rather their different contexts (historical , geographical, cultural, etc.) and providing tools to communicate digital cultural heritage in different ways for different audiences.