Professor emeritus from 2021.
Full professor in computer science (1999-2020), with a main focus on information retrieval, databases, and digital libraries, at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, Italy, where she has started in 1987 the Information Management Systems (IMS) research group which she led from 1987 to 2020.
Associate professor (1987-99). Researcher (1981-87). Research grant holder (1976-81), Fondazione Dalle Molle scholar (1975-76).
Galilean Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts in Padua: Secretary of the Class of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (2023-now), Effective member (2015-now), Corresponding member (2012-15).
Advisor of the degrees in Computer Engineering of the Department (2014-18).
Member of the evaluation team of experts for the Industrial and Information Engineering area of the Italian Research Assessment Exercise (VQR 2004-10) performed by the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) (2011-13).
Over the years she has carried out an intense activity of revision of international, European and national projects, of doctoral students, and of departments of foreign universities. Member of promotion evaluation committees in the department, at national and international levels for assistant, associate and full professor positions.
She has widely published on information retrieval, hypertext information retrieval, annotations of digital content, digital cultural heritage, data engineering, digital libraries and archives, and their evaluation. She worked on hypertext information retrieval, well before the advent of the Web, and she proposed the EXPLICIT model, which distinguished between the documents level (hyper-document) and the semantically related terms level (hyper-concept), offering both semantic association and an associative reading function, and this was adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA) in the HYPERLINE system. The work on EXPLICIT provided the basis for exploring the issue of the automatic construction of hypertexts, which is still crucial nowadays in the context of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. She has been involved in a number of research projects, funded by EU, MIUR, CNR and other funding bodies. Principal investigator or senior researcher of several European Commission research projects including EXAMODE H2020, CULTURA, PROMISE, EuropeanaConnect, TrebleCLEF, TELplus, SAPIR, DELOS, and IDOMENEUS.
She has devoted particular attention to the transfer of knowledge and expertise to new generations of researchers. She launched in 1990 the highly successful and continuing ESSIR summer school series in information retrieval. She has designed and launched the Italian Research Conference on Digital Library Systems (IRCDL), which is an annual event for Italian researchers in the digital library and information retrieval fields.
Member of the Editorial board of the International Journal on Digital Libraries (2005-now). She has been member of the Editorial boards of Information Processing & Management (1990-2008), The Computer Journal (1990-98), Information Retrieval Journal (1997-2007). She was Chair (2009-12) of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL). Member of programme committees of relevant conferences, among those ACM SIGIR, CIKM, TPDL, ACM/IEEE JCDL, ECIR.
She is the 2016 winner of the Tony Kent Strix Award.

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