Italgas and the Giorgio Cini Foundation announce a partnership aimed at transforming the Italgas Historical Archive and cultural assets into a «Heritage Lab», a laboratory equipped with the most advanced technologies for the 2D and 3D digitization of the historical, industrial, artistic and cultural heritage that the Company has collected and preserved throughout its almost two centuries of history. An experience that dates back to the first half of the XNUMXth century, is intertwined on several occasions with the history of the country and the deepening of which will allow an ever wider audience to observe from new angles many of the events that have marked the social, economic and nation's technology.
In this sense «Heritage Lab» wants to be a model, unique in Italy, of digitization archive-laboratory whose purpose is not only the recovery and systematization of the historical archive of a large company but also its conversion into big data of the past and, in this form, its sharing with the community interested in learning more about its contents.
The Italgas Archive will thus be able to expand the opportunities for collaboration at national and international level by developing new archival and historiographical activities and skills by also accessing important circuits such as the ARCHiVe project ("Analysis and Archiving of Cultural Heritage in Venice") created in 2018 by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in collaboration with the Factum Foundation and the Digital Humanities Laboratory of the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, thanks to the support of the Helen Hamlyn Trust, or even the large Time Machine consortium, which includes over 14.000 institutions representing more than 100.000 professionals in the sector committed to investigating the past with the aim of mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution.
A radical paradigm shift aimed at making the most of Italgas' entire cultural heritage thanks to technology: from the historical library to the newspaper library, from museum collections to documentation on archaeological assets found during the laying of the gas infrastructure.
Today the Italgas Historical Archive is made up of an original nucleus of over 1.000 linear meters of documents, 6.000 volumes, brochures and magazines, 35.000 prints, photographs and posters, 350 period equipment and instruments declared to be of considerable historical interest by the Italian State and subject to notification and protection and conservation constraints. An ever-growing heritage whose study allows us to reconstruct not only the history of the Company and the people who worked there, but above all the ties with the country's main events and with the world of energy, the role covered within the process of industrialization of Italy, urban development and public services.
“The digital world and the materials conserved in museums and historical archives – commented the managing director of Italgas Paolo Gallo – may appear to be at odds with each other: on the one hand modernity and dematerialisation, on the other the material evidence of a past up to the present day. The challenge of digital transformation is to find a path that allows these
Italgas and the Giorgio Cini Foundation announce a partnership aimed at transforming the Italgas Historical Archive and cultural assets into a «Heritage Lab», a laboratory equipped with the most advanced technologies for the 2D and 3D digitization of the historical, industrial, artistic and cultural heritage that the Company has collected and preserved throughout its almost two centuries of history. An experience that dates back to the first half of the XNUMXth century, is intertwined on several occasions with the history of the country and the study of which will allow an increasingly large public to observe from new angles many of the events that have marked the social, economic and nation's technology.
The agreement was approved today by the managing director of Italgas, Paolo Gallo, and by the President of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Giovanni Bazoli.
The Giorgio Cini Foundation is a cultural institution that stands out for being, at the same time, a center of study, a place for meeting and debate but also a space in which multidisciplinary research projects are developed, aimed at providing new analysis and understanding of the reality that surrounds us.
In this sense «Heritage Lab» wants to be a model, unique in Italy, of digitization archive-laboratory whose purpose is not only the recovery and systematization of the historical archive of a large company but also its conversion into big data of the past and, in this form, its sharing with the community interested in learning more about its contents.
The Italgas Archive will thus be able to expand the opportunities for collaboration at national and international level by developing new archival and historiographical activities and skills by also accessing important circuits such as the ARCHiVe project ("Analysis and Archiving of Cultural Heritage in Venice") created in 2018 by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in collaboration with the Factum Foundation and the Digital Humanities Laboratory of the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, thanks to the support of the Helen Hamlyn Trust, or even the large Time Machine consortium, which includes more than 14.000 institutions representing
more than 100.000 professionals in the sector engaged in investigating the past with the aim of mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution.
A radical paradigm shift aimed at making the most of Italgas' entire cultural heritage thanks to technology: from the historical library to the newspaper library, from museum collections to documentation on archaeological assets found during the laying of the gas infrastructure.
Today the Italgas Historical Archive is made up of an original nucleus of over 1.000 linear meters of documents, 6.000 volumes, brochures and magazines, 35.000 prints, photographs and posters, 350 period equipment and instruments declared to be of considerable historical interest by the Italian State and subject to notification and protection and conservation constraints. An ever-growing heritage whose study allows us to reconstruct not only the history of the Company and the people who worked there, but above all the ties with the country's main events and with the world of energy, the role covered within the process of industrialization of Italy, urban development and public services.
“The digital world and the materials conserved in museums and historical archives – commented the managing director of Italgas Paolo Gallo – may appear to be at odds with each other: on the one hand modernity and dematerialisation, on the other the material evidence of a past up to the present day. The challenge of digital transformation consists in identifying a path that allows these two worlds to meet and to enhance a history that is not only of Italgas but of the entire country. Thanks to the partnership with the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Heritage Lab becomes another important piece of our profound digital transformation and with it Italgas reconfirms itself as a company in which innovation is not only applied but created".
