This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 12th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL 2016, held in Firence, Italy, in February 2016. The 15 papers presented were carefully selected from 23 submissions and cover topics such as formal methods, long-term preservation, metadata creation, management and curation, multimedia, ontology and linked data. The papers deal with numerous multidisciplinary aspects ranging from computer science to humanities in the broader sense, including research areas such as archival and library information sciences; information management systems; semantic technologies; information retrieval; new knowledge environments.