Building the Historical Archive of the Future: the case of Heritage Lab

Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas

key details

13 November 2023
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

Reference

HeritageLab Italgas

about

Online class on the challenges of the Corporate Digital Archive, digital formats, integrated processes and the role of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The seminary is dedicated to the potential of a digital company archive and the methods of preservation and sharing, in particular of the extensive documentation tracing the history of the Italgas company.

Digital transformation and technological innovation — which are Italgas’ main drives in the energy transition — are at the heart of Heritage Lab. The centre is committed to achieving several objectives, including the systematisation of the historical archive and the management of the current archive, the sharing of digitised documents and their conversion into big data, through a highly automated acquisition cycle thanks to the use of artificial intelligence algorithms for post-production and optical character recognition (OCR).

Programme

The Heritage Lab model

Katya Corvino

Heritage Lab is Italgas’ digitisation museum-laboratory, developed entirely in-house with specialised machinery, technologies and skills from the field of cultural heritage and applied to the massive digital acquisition of Corporate and Industrial Heritage. Their heritage consists of 3 linear kilometres of documents, and it is digitised by a team of specialists, composed of 4 archivists in charge of identifying and selecting the documents, 2 palaeographers with expertise in ancient texts, 3 librarians cataloguing the material, and 15 operators, who carry out the digitisation and append metadata.

Digitisation stream

Matteo Allasia

The digital transformation process can be illustrated with a sequence of nine steps, from the premises of the Italgas Historical Archive, to the cataloguing of documents on the xDams platform, and the selection of the most valuable bulks for digitisation.

At the Heritage Lab laboratory-museum, we select the most appropriate digitisation system based on the document’s format and type.
The scanned images are processed through the Time Machine server, which derives the compressed images from the master copies and applies measurement and OCR scripts. The user copies are then imported into xDams and enriched with a set of metadata, which adds meaningful narratives to the material.

Building the Historical Archive of the Future

Daniela Marendino

Building and feeding the Historical Archive, with the creation of a shared procedure for identifying, preserving and substituting paper documents, is essential to the management of the documentation flow of the current archive.

Heritage Lab has established a new procedure for the management of analog documents and is working on the creation of a new classification and record preservation system, and a management manual, together with an internal communication campaign to raise staff awareness.

Managing the digital heritage of business archives

Giovanni Michetti

The speech will cover the topic of the digital heritage of business archives, focusing in particular on the following points:

– Not just paper: digital objects as archival documents;

– The business archive as an integrated system;

– Digital formats;

– Management and preservation processes in the digital environment;

– The role of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Lecturers

Matteo Allasia

A Heritage Lab expert, he was a fellow at the ARCHiVe Centre, and was then a Regesta.exe contributor for Heritage Lab Italgas. Graduated in Classical Literature and Communication, with a Master’s degree in Digital Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University, he is a digital humanist at the service of corporate cultural heritage. He collaborates in the digital transformation process of the Italgas Archive and works on the maintenance and development of digitisation machines and algorithms for automatic post production.

Katya Corvino

Head of Heritage Lab Italgas, she was also responsible for Corporate Social Responsibility at Italgas. Graduated in Political Science with a Master’s degree in Business Administration, for 30 years in the Eni Group, then Snam and finally Italgas, she has gained 20 years’ experience in the field of relations with institutions and the territory. For 7 years she was responsible for Relations with Local Authorities in the Snam group. Over the years she has also dealt with relations with European institutions as Snam’s representative for the European Union in Brussels.

Daniela Marendino

With twenty years of experience as a professional archivist, she has worked in public, private and corporate archives. She is the curator of the collections of the Italgas Historical Archive, where she oversees the preservation of the documentary heritage and the preservation of the company museum collections, the Library and the Emeroteca, as well as the valorisation of the historical heritage of the Italgas Group companies. She monitors and manages the flow of documents in the historical and current archives, preparing preservation lists and procedures for discarding them.

Giovanni Michetti

Associate Professor of Archivistics at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, he has also taught at the University of Urbino and the University of British Columbia. An expert in digital archives, he deals with document management, descriptive models, digital preservation and new technologies applied to archives. He is chairman of the ‘Archives and document management’ sub-committee in UNI (the Italian standards body) and represents Italy in some ISO working groups on archives and document management. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Council on Archives.