Digital Identity Management and library services access: preparing for the future

Digital identities and their management systems are the core for the next generation ecosystem of trusted ("trusted") digital services. The European Parliament and the European Union Council have set themselves this objective with Regulation 910/2014 (eIDAS), updated in 2024, already transposed by Italy into the Code for Digital Administration (CAD). The architecture and reference framework specification started in 2021 and the ongoing implementations will lead to the adoption by 2026 of the European Digital Identity Wallet (EDIW), whose Italian instance (IT-Wallet) has been released in embryo as recent versions of the App-IO. We are therefore on the eve of a significant transformation from the current way of managing digital identities and access to digital resources and services that will impact on libraries services too. After describing the concepts and methods of access control management and digital identity with some refererences to current libraries context, the paper describes the new decentralized model and examines some aspects of the transformation process that all stakeholders (decision-makers, operators and users) are called upon to be aware in order to assess the difficulties and seize the opportunities offered.