Modeling Digital Cultural Landscapes with DSpace

In a Digital Library environment, we can define Digital cultural landscapes as "virtual ecosystems" in which digital cultural heritage subsets are related with entities such as people, places, events, fonds, etc., according to different visions and interpretations, in a pluralism generating new knowledge and opening up new perspectives. These virtual ecosystems today can be easily structured by cultural institutions, using a popular application such as DSpace, the world's most widely used open source Digital Asset Management System. Extending the DSpace data model by means of the Configurable Entities and enriching the platform with new features, indeed, it is possible to go beyond the traditional boundaries of the Digital libraries, structuring a complex system of relationships between entities, to be explored through networks and structured paths, building new narratives thanks to interdisciplinarity and the coexistence of different domains. The paper aims at illustrating, through sharing experiences and reflections from numerous Digital Library projects managed with DSpace, how this application can contribute to the modeling of new digital cultural landscapes.