Istituto: Digital Centre ARCHiVe

The ARCHiVe Centre is dedicated to the digital acquisition of the cultural heritage on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore and of materials preserved in institutions in the city of Venice and worldwide (archives, book collections, art works and architectural heritage). It also deals with the analysis and preservation of the files obtained and, lastly, the dissemination of the results to the respective user communities.

These results are possible thanks to continuous research, conducted in the fields of both information technology and humanities studies. The creation and use of software and hardware tools is designed for and subordinate to the scholarly objectives associated with the individual projects or the items being researched: the real mission is to find innovative ways of protecting and using the sources, while respecting criteria of feasibility and sustainability and guaranteeing high quality and security.

Hand in hand with research, ARCHiVe offers its collaborators the opportunity of learning by doing with the aim of furthering knowledge about methods and the potential of the digital revolution for the benefit of young researchers. This process is possible thanks to the coordination between ARCHiVe’s partners (the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Factum Foundation and EPFL) and other national and international institutions that collaborate with ARCHiVe on joint projects.

In the ARCHiVe laboratories at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini it is possible to digitise and post-produce paper and photographic documents, maps and drawings, works of art of various kinds, three-dimensional items, sound documents and analogue or digital audiovisual documents. The laboratories themselves are the result of experimentation and adaptation to the needs of the material to be digitised and the requirements for particular collaborations.

Given the Foundation’s specific needs for cataloguing and describing archives, the ARCHiVe Centre always works jointly with the Cini Institutes and Centres to guarantee the necessary support in the planning, defining and structuring of digital archives.

The historic Seguso glass furnace became a company in 1933, a time of great innovation and plans for manufacturing developments.

The internationally recognised glassworks entered the contemporary art scene and began to export its creations worldwide. Major international museums bought Seguso art glass designed by Flavio Poli, such as the Victoria & Albert, London, the Landesgewerbemuseum, Stuttgart, the Neue Sammlung, Munich, the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the MoMA, New York.

Sold in 1972, the historic brand returned in 2008 to the Seguso family, which had continued to play an entrepreneurial role in the field of glass production. Seguso thus became one of the craft companies that have made Murano art glass a major artistic tradition in Venice, Italy and the rest of the world.

Donated to the Fondazione Cini in 2012 and held in the Centro Studi del Vetro, the Seguso Vetri d’Arte archive contains thousands of designs documenting the highly varied production of the artists and designers who collaborated with the glassworks from 1932 to 1972.

The corpus held at the Fondazione consists of 22,044 working drawings and sketches, 25,296 photographs and around 30 production catalogues divided between showroom catalogues (7 volumes, 1939-1971) with drawings of individual hand-made models, lighting production catalogues (19 volumes) and the Barbier order catalogues (5 volumes).

These precious materials have been ordered, described and digitised by the Glass Study Centre in the ARCHiVes laboratories and are available online together with the other digital archives of the Centro Studi del Vetro. ARCHiVe collaborated in the project by training the Centro Studi staff in the digitisation and post-production of the items; ARCHiVe also supported the Centro Studi del Vetro in the choices involved in the archival description of the collection.

Click here for the Seguso Vetri d’Arte online archive.

The main challenges during the digitisation phase were not only due to the great variety of the materials but also the types and material specificity of the items, especially delicate drawings.

During the photographic acquisition of the drawings, the effectiveness of the suction worktop was tested, a tool used in the ARCHiVe laboratories to smooth the materials in a controlled way, in order to reduce folds and creases and improve the readability of the documents for the duration of the shot.

Post-production also posed an interesting challenge for ARCHiVe staff: develop scripts to crop files automatically for the purpose of working with drawings on thin, semi-transparent paper or with irregular edges.

The scholarly coordination is managed by the Fondazione Cini Institute of Art History.

Ulderico Rolandi (Rome, 23/07/1874 – 03/12/1951), a gynaecologist by profession, was also a critic and collector, actively involved in music studies.

In 1893 Rolandi bought a small group of librettos, which formed the basis of a vast collection that he continued to add to until his death: a total of about 21,500 printed, manuscript or typescript librettos from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and various special editions.

After his death, his heirs looked after the collection until 1957, when negotiations began for its donation to the Fondazione Cini, conducted by Vittorio Cini himself, assisted by Vittore Branca. That same year the Rolandi collection became part of the collections in what was then called the Institute of Literature, Music and Theatre. Today the Rolandi librettos are housed in the Foundation’s Institute for Theatre and Opera.

Over the years, the collection has been the subject of various development projects. Catalogued in the National Library System (SBN), thanks to the A.CO.M. project (1987-1990), an initial selection was digitised in the Echo project (2005-2008). Today, this selection can be consulted in the Institute’s digital library.

The ARCHiVe Centre is currently working with the Institute on the digitisation of the librettos and the preparation of the acquisition files ahead of their online publication. The digitisation at ARCHiVe laboratories makes use of a V scanner (a photographic acquisition tool for bound items) and a software application capable of metadating files during the digitisation phase, inserting not only management metadata, but also descriptive metadata concerning the cartulation and providing the possibility to indicate through tags information such as the presence of engravings, a spine, covers, etc.

In addition to librettos, the Rolandi Archive includes a thematic library and a collection of music scores, playbills, prints and portraits of composers, musicians, singers and personalities from the world of music. These items can be consulted in the Institute of Theatre and Opera Digital Archive.

The scholarly coordination of the project is managed by the Institute of Theatre and Opera.

Alain Daniélou (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 04/10/1907 – Lonay, 27/01/1994) was a historian of religions, orientalist, a great expert on India and a scholar in the field of music. He left his archive to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in 1971. The materials are now held by the Foundation’s Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (IISMC), an institute Daniélou founded in 1969, in association with the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in Berlin (1963).

Devoted to Indian music, philosophy, arts and religions, the archive consists of over 300 manuscript copies of Sanskrit treatises on music, the transcriptions having been made by Daniélou and his collaborators to bring together the most important texts on Indian musicology from various libraries in India. The archive also contains around 300,000 catalogue entries concerning Indian music, philosophy and culture, with annotations, bibliographical references and drawings.

Most of the manuscript works can already be consulted in the IISMC digital archive.

A project for the automatic transcription of manuscript texts in Sanskrit, Hindi and English, currently underway, has been carried out by ARCHiVe researchers. Using Transkribus software and machine learning scripts, they train models for automatic text transcription. The aim is to make available to scholars the transcription of the sources, which will then be searchable in the digital archive, making them easier to read and study.

Previously transcribed and digitalised catalogue entries will function as hypertexts containing links to the sources cited.

The Fondazione Cini and the ARCHiVe Centre were among the first in the world to apply Transkribus automatic manuscript transcription software to Sanskrit and Hindi.

The scholarly coordination is managed by the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies.

Tiziano Terzani (Florence, 14/09/1938 – Orsigna, 28/07/2004) was an Italian journalist and writer. A profound connoisseur of the Asian continent, he first landed there in 1965, sent by Olivetti. He collaborated with several newspapers, including Der Spiegel, Il Giorno, L’Espresso, Il Messaggero, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. From his professional experience came the inspiration for his books, which were published all over the world.

After his death, first the personal library (2012) and then the archive (2014) were donated by the Terzani family to the Giorgio Cini Onlus Foundation and preserved by the Foundation’s Center of Comparative Studies of Civilization and Spirituality.

The objectives of the project, carried out by the Study Center jointly with the ARCHiVe Center, are the reorganization, archival description, securing and conditioning of the materials in the collection, as well as the digitization of a part of them – both the material of greatest interest for consultation purposes and the material in problematic condition from a conservation point of view.

ARCHiVe then collaborated also in the online publication of the Terzani fund by making the materials available in the digital archives section of the Foundation’s website, where it is possible to consult the entire described fund and part of the digitized original documents. Prominent among these is the collection of photographic positives, a priceless testimony that counts some 8,600 photographs taken during his travels. Together with more than 70,000 negatives – not yet digitized – these images, a mirror of cultures, countries and epochal changes, represent the iconographic counterpoint to Terzani’s writings preserved at the Cini Foundation.

The archival description of the fund is constantly being expanded: in fact, the Center for the Study of Comparative Civilization and Spirituality is deepening the description of the correspondence. Advances will be visible online, so the fund page should be considered constantly updated.

Terzani’s library, on the other hand, has been cataloged on the National Library System (SBN) by the Foundation Library staff.