Impressum

What is Phaidra

Phaidra (Permanent Hosting, Archiving and Indexing of Digital Resources and Assets) is the University Library System's platform for long-term archiving of digital objects and collections.

The platform is multidisciplinary and hosts digital objects of various types, such as images, text documents, books and videos, mostly derived from the digitisation of analogue originals. The different types of cultural heritage represented include rare books, manuscripts, photographs, wall teaching charts, maps, museum objects, archival materials, and parchments.

This heterogeneity of assets corresponds to a heterogeneity of origins: the cultural heritage comes from libraries (particularly thanks to digitization projects promoted by the University Library System), museums, archives, centres, and offices of the University of Padua, from Ca' Foscari and IUAV Universities in Venice, and from other cooperating institutions.

Phaidra collects cultural heritage digitised by institutional users of the University and cooperating institutions and disseminates it to the scientific community and citizens.

It contributes to promoting the University's Third Mission cultural and social activities, namely making available public goods of a social, educational and cultural nature to improve the general level of societal well-being.

Phaidra Features and Services

The main features and services offered by Phaidra are:

Long-term archiving of digital objects (images, text documents, audio, video, books, collections, and other resource types)

Description and indexing of digital objects

Keyword search and faceted browsing for search results refinement

Terms of use

License models applicable to digital objects

Bilingual user interface (Italian and English)

High-resolution image viewer

Creation and viewing of page-turnable books

Guides and help tools for users

Who Can Use Phaidra

Anyone can conduct searches, browse the archived digital collections, and, unless otherwise indicated, view and download digital objects.

Archiving objects is reserved for institutional users of the University of Padua, subject to training, as well as external individuals and institutions who have obtained the necessary authorisations. To archive objects, a Phaidra account is required, which can be requested through the Helpline of the University Library System, and acceptance of the terms of use.

Why Use Phaidra

Every object is assigned a permanent Phaidra URL and a persistent identifier (Handle) that enables citability

Archiving digital objects and collections in the platform enables large-scale dissemination, improving their accessibility and valorisation

Offers the possibility to organise objects – of various formats and different origins – into virtual collections and link them through relationships

Allows assigning a specific usage license to each object and limiting visibility to metadata and preview only

Meets the characteristics of the FAIR principles – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable – indicated by the European Commission in the Guidelines on FAIR Data Management in Horizon 2020

Is interoperable with other reference platforms for cultural heritage, such as Europeana

Is CoreTrustSeal certified

Supports the TRUST principles (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, Technology)

Help Using Phaidra

Phaidra offers a range of support tools to facilitate both navigation and search operations, as well as object archiving:

Help page with explanations on user interface, navigation, customisations, object uploading, and printable guides

Help-desk service, contactable through the Helpline of the University Library System

Training seminars

Individual assistance

Phaidra Timeline

The Phaidra project was born in 2008 at the University of Vienna (https://rdm.univie.ac.at/phaidra-repository/).

In 2010, the University of Padua initiated a collaboration for the use and development of Phaidra. The Agreement with the University of Vienna was approved on February 23, 2010, by the Scientific Technical Committee of the University of Padua Library Centre (minutes of meeting no. 2/2010).

Between 2012 and 2013, some Phaidra collections were published on Europeana as part of the European Linked Heritage project.

Since 2014, Ca' Foscari University and IUAV University, of Venice, have published their digital collections in Padua's Phaidra installation.

In subsequent years, other institutions and associations have also chosen to use Phaidra for their digital collections, signing specific agreements with the University Library Centre of the University of Padua.

In 2016, the Padua Library System joined the Confederation of Open Access Repositories – COAR, the international association of institutions managing Open Access digital repositories.

In 2019, Phaidra obtained the CoreTrustSeal certification which guarantees the reliability of digital repositories in compliance with standards for long-term preservation of data and metadata.

In 2023, Phaidra was a case study in the European project A FAIR-enabling citation model for Cultural Heritage Objects, funded by EOSC Future and promoted by the Research Data Alliance (RDA).

In October 2025, Padua hosted PHAIDRAcon for the first time, the annual meeting of the European community of PHAIDRA users, organised jointly by the Universities of Vienna and Padua, coordinated by the University of Padua Library Centre.

In 2026, Phaidra was upgraded to a new technological model that involved, in particular, a significant infrastructural improvement and the adoption of a data model based on Linked Open Data.

In 2026, the University Library Centre declared its support for the TRUST principles, and Phaidra joined the FIDELIS Network of Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs) as a provisional member.

Internationally, Phaidra is used by more than 20 European institutions. Information about Phaidra partners is available on the Phaidra.org web portale.

Organisational Structure

The Phaidra staff consists of librarians and IT specialists from the Digital Library Office of the University Library Centre and takes care of maintaining and developing Phaidra. The Phaidra staff supports the University Library System in digitisation projects and provides assistance and consulting to the University of Padua departments, offices, and external cooperating institutions for archiving digital objects and collections in Phaidra.

The staff and proponents of a digitisation project interact at all project phases, from the project proposal to activity analysis, from the project launch phase to its completion with archiving and publication in Phaidra.

The partnership between the University of Padua and the University of Vienna is kept active through constant collaboration and dialogue, particularly in terms of technological development.

The international community of Phaidra users meets annually at the PHAIDRAcon conference, which includes:

A meeting reserved for Phaidra partners to present updates on ongoing activities and collect and share ideas, suggestions, best practices, and guidelines for future development

A public conference that explores in depth, through contributions from experts, including those outside the Phaidra community, one or more topics of particular relevance.

Since 2020, PHAIDRAcon has replaced the previous meeting occasions: Phaidra Annual Meeting (formerly Phaidra Steering Committee) and Technical Meeting.

The Phaidra user community is also active through a forum and a series of periodic online meetings (Phaidra Community Calls).

The partnership between the University of Padua and other cooperating institutions includes sharing the Phaidra platform with the publication of these institutions' digital collections in Phaidra Padua's installation.

Metadata

Starting in 2026, Phaidra adopts a bibliographic metadata schema modelled in RDF (Resource Description Framework) according to Linked Data principles, ensuring unique identification of resources, explicit semantic relationships, and interoperability with other data graphs on the Web. Metadata is expressed in JSON-LD, a standard RDF serialisation that favours integration with web applications and data exchange. Many fields use descriptors from controlled vocabularies, mostly available in the Phaidra Vocabulary Server.
For an overview of metadata fields, you can consult the Metadata fields overview page.

Digital objects uploaded before 2026 remain described according to the previously adopted data model Universität Wien metadata (UWmetadata in abbreviated form), resulting from the expansion of the Learning Object Metadata standard, LOM (1484.12.1-2002 IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata) and the fusion combination of categories and elements derived or customised from different metadata schemas, and as such can be placed among the examples of LOM application profiles.

Technical Specifications

Phaidra is based on the open-source software Fedora, a modular architecture for managing digital resources on which digital repositories and libraries can be built, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialised access to large digital collections of historical and cultural materials, as well as scientific data.

Technology Platform

Phaidra consists of a constellation of open-source software configured to operate in a coordinated manner. The main components are:

Fedora, "the flexible, standards-based, open-source repository software built to support long-term digital preservation", for long-term preservation of digital objects

Phaidra API, which allows access to platform functionalities in a complete (REST), secure, and programmatic way

Phaidra UI, the web interface for Phaidra, is available in multiple languages

Docker, the flexible system for composing and updating applications, acts as glue for the platform

Authentication, LDAP, Shibboleth and more, to have user management at the platform level

IIIF, 3D, video, audio, books, texts and other viewers, to display and facilitate reuse of objects in Phaidra

OAI-PMH for dissemination in catalogues and collections

Handle and DOI to give digital objects a stable home

Apache Solr to make object search easy and fast

Apache Tika to extract additional content from objects (e.g. full-text)

OCFL, a standard and recognised model for digital representation of objects, suitable for preservation inside and outside Phaidra

Grafana, Prometheus and other systems, to monitor and always be informed in a simple way about what happens in the platform

A detailed list of supported technologies and a description of the general architecture are available on the Architecture page of the Phaidra.org portal. Further details can be found in Phaidra's GitHub repository.

For a detailed list of services and access methods, you can consult the information in the re3data.org, FAIRsharing.org, OpenDOAR, and COAR IRD repository registries.

OAI-PMH Base URL: https://phaidra.unipd.it/api/oai
REST API Documentation: https://phaidra.unipd.it/api/openapi
IIIF Endpoint: https://phaidra.unipd.it/api/imageserver?IIIF=PID.tif/info.json