Expectations from Artificial Intelligence: What Changed During the Decades?

Artificial intelligence has been often perceived as a promising field that can provide methods and tools that can be extended to other research areas and exploited in industrial applications. Digital libraries and archives can thus have a twofold benefit. Since research and evaluation can hardly be carried out without the development of a working system, based on a real collection accessed by real users, it could be expected that artificial intelligence plays a central role in the design and development of the many components of a digital library or of a digital archive. This short communication starts from a review of what was expected from artificial intelligence in the research areas that converge in the interdisciplinary field of digital libraries, concluding with a number of considerations on what could be today’s expectations from the variety of persons – researchers, stakeholders, librarians, users – involved in the design, development and access to organized digital content.