La Digital Library of the Milan Conservatory of Music was founded in 2007 with the aim of creating a digital repository with the images of certain collections or documents of particular historical and musicological value held in the collection, and to make it possible to search and view digital content directly from the OPAC. The Digital Library aims to promote an ever-greater awareness of the Library's musical heritage.
The birth of the Digital Library was facilitated by participation in national and local projects funded by the MIUR, the Lombardy Region, the Municipality of Milan, the Rotary Club Milano San Siro, Unicredit and other Milanese institutions.
Specific digitalisation campaigns were accompanied right from the start by the decision to enrich the Library's digital collections with images from users' reproduction requests.
Since 2019 the Digital Library has been hosted on the platform open source DSpace-GLAM, which enables the management of data and metadata, the viewing of high-resolution images via a web interface, and the long-term preservation of digital cultural heritage, thereby ensuring the accessibility and sharing of the digitised musical and musicological heritage of the Milan Conservatory Library.
The resources can be accessed using the platform's query interface or starting from the bibliographic records of the institutional catalogues (SBN OPAC e OPAC of Polo LO1 of the Lombardy Region).
Access to bibliographic resources – which are always fully digitised – is free and navigation is facilitated by structural metadata, which constitute a sort of index of a document's images. Resources are organised in collections.