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

Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas
Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas
Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas
Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas

key details

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

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.

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries

De scientia venandi per aves, MS 446, fol. 1r (1450 –1475) © Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
Treatise on falconry, MS arabe 2831, fol. 1r (1444) © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
Kitāb na‘t al-ḥayawān, MS Or. 2784, fol. 229r (13th century) © British Library, London
MEFA digital archive, ContentDm view

key details

14 September 2023
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

Reference

  • Factum Foundation
  • University of Oxford

About

Cristina Dondi, Professor of Early European Book Heritage at the University of Oxford, where she also leads the 15cBOOKTRADE project, will present a research on the lost Benedictine Library that was once part of the monastery at San Giorgio Maggiore, now home to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and ARCHiVe – Analysis and Recordings of Cultural Heritage in Venice. The monastery was suppressed in 1806 and its rich collection of manuscripts and incunabula was dispersed. Dondi and colleagues have identified the location of over 180 important works and continue to add new titles as they are located in museums, libraries and private collections.

While Dondi’s research is focused on a disbanded library, the work of the Middle-East Falconry Archive (MEFA), commissioned by the Mohammed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund (MBZRCF) and carried out by Factum Foundation based within ARCHiVe, is centred on bringing all known medieval Arabic manuscripts on Falconry together online in one place.

Carolina Gris (Factum Foundation, Madrid-Venezia) will present a summary of the first two years’ work and discuss the role of IIIF and inter-library sharing to make specialist areas of interest available to a wider audience of both scholars and general interest users. This approach to the creation of specialised repositories of knowledge is paving the way to a new future for libraries and library users.

lecturers

Cristina Dondi

Cristina Dondi is Professor of Early European Book Heritage, and Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She is also the Secretary of CERL. In 2009 she created the international database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI). She is the editor of Printing Revolution and Society, 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe (Venice, 2020, open access), and, together with Dorit Raines and Richard Sharpe, of How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Europe, 16th–19th Centuries (Turnhout, 2022).

Carolina Gris

Carolina Gris is responsible for coordinating and implementing 3D digitisation projects for Factum Foundation in Italy and other locations in Europe.
She has taught theoretical and practical workshops on digital preservation, and has lectured and published on new modes of access to cultural heritage. She has managed the Middle East Falconry Archive (MEFA) since 2021.

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries

Gazing Machines

Quayola Pleasant Places, Glow Festival Eindhoven
portrait of the artist with red digital background
Quayola Portrait © Skino Ricci
Quayola, Sculpture Factory, Paradise Art Space, Asymmetric-Archaeology, Seoul_South-Korea, 2018-2019
Quayola, Remains, HOW Art Museum, Asymmetric Archaeology, Gazing Machines, Shanghai, 2019

key details

12 December 2022
Online on Zoom / Onsite at ARCHiVe
4pm — 6pm (CET)

about

A lecture by Quayola, artist who employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper. His work has been performed and exhibited in many prestigious institutions worldwide including V&A Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; How Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival.

Also a frequent collaborator on musical projects, Quayola has worked with composers, orchestras and musicians including London Contemporary Orchestra, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Vanessa Wagner, Jamie XX, Mira Calix, Plaid and Tale Of Us. In 2013, Quayola was awarded the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica.

Lecturer

Davide Quayola

Born in 1982 in Rome, he quickly tried to get away from the Italian capital and its historical iconography, choosing to move to London at the age of 19 to seek new subjects, a new language and a new way of expression. In 2005, he obtained an art degree from the University of London. Through his enigmatic videos, Quayola creates hybrid spaces of animated painting and sculpture. Using a procedure of audio-visual performance, drawing, photography and software programming, he explores a fine line between the real and the artificial.

The Third Thing. On Digital Photography

Jaipur #8 © Ljubodrag Andric
Bundi #1 © Ljubodrag Andric
Villa Farsetti, Treviso #12 © Ljubodrag Andric
Venezia, Fondazione G. Cini #9 © Ljubodrag Andric
Japur #30 © Ljubodrag Andric
Napoli, Casa Morra #11 © Ljubodrag Andric

key details

26 April 2023, 4pm — 6pm (CET)
27 April 2023, 9am — 1pm (CET)
Online on Zoom / Onsite at Fondazione Giorgio Cini

about

Two days dedicated to the digital image and its role in the contemporary world, through the work method of photographer and artist Ljubodrag Andric. His research investigates the relationship between space and architecture and revolves around the re-contextualisation of the urban landscape.
The programme includes a lecture and a photographic promenade around the spaces of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

Programme

April 26, 2023

On Digital Photography

Starting from an investigation into the technical evolution of photography in the digital era, Ljubodrag Andric proposes a reflection on the current over-production of “weightless” photographic images, as much due to their ephemeral nature as to their lack of adherence to a narrative of reality.

April 27, 2023

Photographic Promenade

Symposium around the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in order to explore the methodological part of the artist’s work and the themes raised during the previous lecture from a practical point of view.

Lecturer

Ljubodrag Andric

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1965 into a family of artists, Andric started his involvement with art and photography at the age of 15. He studied humanities at the University of Belgrade, then dedicated himself entirely to photography in 1987. At age 21 Andric received his first professional commissions of mostly architectural photography. He had his first exhibition – at the gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade – at the age of 23. In 1987 Andric moved to Rome, Italy where he had successful studio practices in both Rome and Milan over the following 15 years, before moving to Canada in 2002. He won numerous international awards.

 

On Digital Photography by Ljubodrag Andric