2018 – 2023
Centro Studi del Vetro and ARCHiVe worked together on digitising and publishing online the entire Seguso Vetri d’Arte Archive, which contains thousands of projects attesting to the varied production of the artists and designers who collaborated with the glassworks from 1932 to 1973.
The project
The historic Seguso forge became a company in 1933, during a period of great innovation and manufacturing planning. During this period, in addition to artistic production, activities related to architectural projects also took off, both in the field of lighting and furnishing; glassworks became internationally recognised in the panorama of contemporary art. The Seguso Archive, arrived in 2012 to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and destined for the Centro Studi del Vetro, contains thousands of projects attesting to the varied production of the artists and designers who collaborated with the glassworks from 1932 to 1973.
The acquired corpus consists of 22,044 executive drawings and sketches, 25,296 photographs and about thirty production catalogues divided between Showroom catalogues (7 volumes, 1939-1971) with drawings of individual hand-made models, Lighting production catalogues (19 volumes) and Barbier order catalogues (5 volumes).
Objectives
The digitisation and cataloging project of the Seguso Vetri d’Arte Archive aims to enhance the documentary heritage, scientific research and dissemination of materials, thus meeting the criteria of consultation and preservation of original materials. Objectives of the project are also archival description and online publication of the archive.
Developments
1. Material analysis
Material analysis and creation of archival structure and first description
2. reorganisation
Photographic positives on paper: reorganisation
3. labelling
Drawings: cleaning, securing, conditioning and labelling
4. Digitization
Digitization of the entire Archive. 13,311 printed photographs digitised recto/verso for a total of 26,622 files, 22,479 large format drawings digitised double-sided for a total of 44,958 files and 255 very large format drawings (up to 4 metres) digitised recto/verso for a total of 510 files (100%) segmented with algorithms
5. Import
Import of data descriptions, metadata and digital images, solution of visualization problems
6. Automatic post production
Automatic post production of the series Illuminazione and Progetti Speciali: ARCHiVe created a new script for automatic post production based on this new dataset and it was launched in July 2022. This step comprehends the export in .jpg for the upload on the cataloging system (xDams) and the extraction of information such as the dimension of the document digitized
