Città per gli archivi (City for the archives) in Bologna is a project in order to network city archives from ‘800 and ‘900 that in last few years made available lots of documents, images, videos and audio to the research community and the public by the web-portal ArchIVI. We met Armando Antonelli, project manager of the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna.

Dario Taraborrelli: How “Città degli archivi” born?

Armando Antonelli: “Città degli archivi” started in 2007 from the collaboration between the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna and then was developed by the advice of a team of experts (Linda Giuva, Mariella Guercio, Guido Melis, Stefano Vitali e Isabella Zanni Rosiello). From the beginning “Una città per gli archivi” has been proposed as a complete archival intervention, and therefore able to meet both the challenges of the physical preservation of the archives and those linked to their ordering and their description with the preparation of digital inventories, so build an informative patrimony that could be made available to network users.

D.T: Which phases of the development have you followed?

A.A: In 2006 divers meetings to set down basis for its implementation by providing a knowledge base of the situation and consistence of the reality archive in Bologna and outlining the model and guidelines for material descriptions. The first operations were launched between summer and autumn 2007, after the selection of the candidates, the sign of a comprehensive agreement with the Superintendent of Archives of Emilia-Romagna and for each archival project two specific agreements with the conservative parties involved in the work. Between 2008 and 2010 interventions continued enriching the archival documentary collection and digitizing a large part of documents. In recent years has continued to increase the archival heritage.

Screenshot from www.cittadegliarchivi.it, Courtesy Città degli Archivi

Screenshot from www.cittadegliarchivi.it, Courtesy Città degli Archivi

D.T: Which institutions have made available their archives?

A.A: The project focused on about 200 archives constituted of different documentary typologies preserved by 40 institutions in Bologna (http://www.cittadegliarchivi.it/soggetti-conservatori). It’s about archival founds and therefore creators of archives that can be distinguished in according to the classification suggested by the legal nature of public archives and private archives, while a discrimination of diplomatistic nature, codicological and typology of archival sources might divide between traditional archives and special funds, such as those with photographs, audiovisual and sound records. Making a summary budget of what has been achieved in recent years appeard that the described archives have common features like to go back in their entirety to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been produced in the city and be located on urban land, stored in the archives of public bodies, institutions characterized by various legal entities or private. These funds are very different about the processes of production, storage and archival tradition. Also those archives are characterized by original sedimentation and various documentary typologies. Different then are the institutional history and the archival history, there are many creators and holders, different is the state of preservation and the regulation of access to the public; at least there are heterogeneous consistency that can range from a few files to documentary collections consisting of tens of linear meters.

D.T: In which way it was decided to represent the actually archival?

A.A: To make accessible the large amount of documentation and materials preserved in the archives taken in account, few choices been made. The first necessary decision was to standardize the description of fonds and the documentary typologies in the archives from the document management platform xDams. The second was to represent that information, on the web portal ArchIVI, through their presentation on vertical panels according to the descriptive level open to the right or left side of the search result obtained (left are the primary level of the fonds – as the bottom, the series and the subseries – and on the right archival and documentary units). The third was to design a dynamic portal, that from the usual consultation vertical tree, multilevel and hierarchical complexes documentaries inventoried (browsing), also would offer the use of digital copies concerning photographs, posters, iconographic material , movies and sound sources and put available to less experienced users methods of interrogation of inventories based on lists of keywords (such as names of people, place, institution, author) and on lists of subject indexing.

Screenshot from www.cittadegliarchivi.it, Courtesy Città degli Archivi

Screenshot from www.cittadegliarchivi.it, Courtesy Città degli Archivi

D.T: After two years from the activation of the Web portal, how many archives have been published? Are there digital reproductions of archival documents?

A.A: From the 11th of April 2013 till now have been published on the portal 170 inventories (http://www.cittadegliarchivi.it/fondi) fund, series, parts of archives, collections, audiovisual records, audio records which have been linked to about 100000 digital reproductions of archival documents (including photographs, posters, films, interviews, sound tracks). Besides several virtual exhibitions have been generated by this documentation. Part of it, as some videos taken from the archive Home Movies, is published in YouTube channel, in the footer of the site, while another social network, Flickr, which is also easily accessible from the portal, can be used to document through photo galleries main events organized or which participates in the project. In the coming months is expected to expand both the supply of inventories to reach the two hundred inventories in 2016, and the consistency of digital reproductions of documents available to users of the portal.

D.T: In this regard after two years from activation of the archives portal which response was received by the public?

A.A: To provide a less superficial answer to the feedback received by users on the portal would be good to integrate the analytical data of the public on the portal archives and open communication with the editors of the portal itself. Overall it emerges clearly some data which I think are positive for a portal which provides Web inventories archival local (essentially Bologna, nineteeth and twentieth century). The portal is constantly used by about 70 users per day, a lower activity over the weekend, more intense during the winter season, except for the Christmas break. Some events have had great impact on the audience as the virtual documentary exhibition organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna for the 30th anniversary of the death of Enrico Berlinguer (http://www.cittadegliarchivi.it/mostrevirtuali/enrico-berlinguer- 1922-1984) visited in a few days by hundreds of people. Since the opening of the public portal to now there are more than 50,000 sessions on the portal, over 30 thousand knowledgeable users who viewed about 140,000 pages, with an average stay of about 3 minutes per session. During the second year we have increased non-Italian users, even though more than 90% of the visitors are nationals and decreased the frequency of visits made from Bologna compared to those of other parts of Italy.

Dario Taraborrelli

 

Link: www.cittadegliarchivi.it; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwl-WoqUC0o

 

 

This post is also available in: Italian