Abstract:

The goal of this contribution is to present the mission and knowledge domain of the So.Re.Com. “A.S. de Rosa” @-Library: a multi-purpose web-platform for integrating scientific documentation, networking and training in the field of Social Representations and Communication (So.Re.Com.).

Social Representations and Communication is a supra-disciplinary area of the social sciences, and in particular from the optic of Social Psychology, inspired by the Social Representations Theory, one of the most important theories of the social construction of knowledge. Founded by Serge Moscovici in 1961, the study of social representations, originally specifically European, is currently a multilingual, worldwide supra-disciplinary field with a substantial body of literature. The field of Social Representations represents a unifying meta-theoretical perspective on the social construction of knowledge and its relation to socially situated practices in the dialogue between expert and lay people knoweldge and media.

A main characteristic of this supra-disciplinary field is its great consistency in terms of epistemological and theoretical inspiration and its rich diversity both:
- from the paradigmatic point of view
- in terms of methodological approaches
- from the thematic point of view
- with respect to the applied contexts and domains of expert and lay knowledge production and transmission: education, health, economics, environment, tourism, politics, organisations, media industry, etc.

Born from a personal bibliographic inventory, initially including almost 500 specialized references in the field of Social Representations and Communication, the So.Re.Com. “A.S. de Rosa” @-library has been transferred into an ad-hoc designed relational data base and implemented in 1996 on the common web site of the European/International Joint PhD in Social Representations and Communication: http://www.europhd.eu. Currently including almost 10000 references, and a vast and growing collection of bibliographic entries, it is built on an on-going multi-year project led by the director of the European PhD on Social Representations and Communication Research Centre and Multimedia Lab who is also the creator and the program director of the European/International Joint PhD in Social Representations and Communication and of the So.Re.Com. THEmatic NETwork (prof. Annamaria Silvana de Rosa). She has designed specific web-tools for the purpose of conducting an empirical meta-theoretical analysis of the complete body of literature on Social Representations.

This So.Re.Com. “A.S. de Rosa” @-library is a multiform digital environment of integrated relational data-bases conceived in the logic of the semantic web, including a series of web interfaces aimed to integrate documentation services (bibliographic repository, meta-theoretical analysis repository, intelligent @-Library) with networking (interactive web-videoconference, on-line So.Re.Com. virtual community) and research training (European/International Joint PhD “Virtual Campus”: video-courses in streaming, distant tutoring and co-tutoring, on-line trainee evaluation, etc.), thus stimulating a rich and ever-growing research and learning environment that is advantageous to research team members, trainees and experts alike.

Keywords:

E-Library, Social Representations and Communication, web-platform for training, documentation and networking, Joint international doctorate.