About – Its purpose, goals, and main activities.

Welcome to the ITSERR project!

ITSERR (Italian Strengthening of the ESFRI RI RESILIENCE) is a interdisciplinary and distributed Research Infrastructure for Religious Studies, designed to support the existing national infrastructure and bring it to a higher level of maturity. Led by Centro Nazionale per la Ricerca (CNR), ITSERR aims to transform the scientific community of Religious Studies from being a mere actor in the implementation of established technologies to the driver of a new match with the new assets of AI/BD/HPC.

The purpose of the ITSERR project is to strengthen the RESILIENCE RI in its preparatory phase, through its national institutional dimension, scientific positioning, technical development, and public perception. We aim to support excellence by putting the most qualified scholars and researchers in Religious Studies and ICT at the service of the excellence in research in Religious Studies, producing disruptive innovation for the domain.

In addition to supporting excellence, the ITSERR project also aims to advance efficiency by improving the accessibility to data, facilities, and experts belonging to the national context and promoting data FAIRness. We also hope to expand the national network of researchers, users, and stakeholders and be able to translate the national experience on other national contexts and at the European level.

The ITSERR project will offer a range of services and tools to enhance operativity, including access to a central hub as an entrance point to distributed resources such as manuscripts, experts, and devices, as well as the provision of training activities and the support of the digital transformation of the community. We also aim to attract scholarship, research, and industry to leverage the Italian scientific community of Religious Studies towards a more innovation-oriented research methodology.

Our main activities include:

  • Providing access to a wide and ever-enlarging data sets for the study of religions.
  • Strengthening scientific excellence and improving research conditions.
  • Leveraging the quality of research conducted in the European Research Area and beyond.
  • Functioning as a pole of attraction for users all over the world.
  • Encouraging researchers to move towards the institutions composing the RI.
  • Reducing the obstacles in the transnational access to the resources for Religious Studies.
  • Enhancing onsite and online access to digitized resources.
  • Increasing the mobility of scholars who need to conduct research on the resources consulted onsite.
  • Providing long-term data preservation for future generations.
  • Supporting the availability of multilingual (meta)data.
  • Promoting the participation of underrepresented groups.

We aim that the ITSERR project will have a significant impact on the scientific community of Religious Studies, and we are excited to work with researchers from all over the world to advance knowledge in this field.