Date

September 30 2014–October 1 2015

Nation, Region, Province

Italy

Town

Padova

Venue

“Fiore di Botta” Biomedical Teaching Building, University of Padova

Address

Via del Pescarotto, 8, 35131 Padova - Italy

Users

Free entrance

Subject

Biology Teaching

The Exhibition “Ars Didactica – Wall Charts of the zoological collection of the Department of Biology” has been set up on the occasion of the inauguration of the Fiore di Botta (Botta’s Flower), the new educational building of biology and preclinical medicine. The name of the structure comes from the Swiss architect Mario Botta, who created a flower-like plan for the building.

The exhibition lasted one year, from September 30 2014 to October 1 2015, and displayed 28 wall charts of the large collection, property of the Department of Biology- University of Padova. The whole collection (more than 200 items) is preserved in the Biological Medical Library in the Vallisneri Building.

Nowadays the 28 charts of the exhibition are temporarily placed at the first and second floor of the “Botta’s Flower”building, while the access to the remains of the collection may take place on demand in the library of Vallisneri building.

 

The exhibition at the "Fiore di Botta" building. Photo credits: University of Padova, Servizio Relazioni Pubbliche, Progetti Editoriali e Promozione Pubblicitaria.

 

The wallcharts, formerly largely employed for science teaching in the higher education institutions all around the world, went into disuse after the second World War, when new visual teaching supports became available; nevertheless due to the scientific and historical value and the artistic aspect, it was necessary to preserve and enhance them.
Therefore the Library System of the Athenaeum, with the Departments concerned, launched the project "Digitization of educational wallcharts of the Scientific Departments of the University of Padova".
The project includes census, cataloging, restoration, scientific description and digitization of the wallcharts owned by the Departments of Biology, Geosciences, Mathematics, Physics and Pharmaceutical Science. So far 311 out of a total of 607 have been digitized and are accessible in internet at "PHAIDRA" (Permanent Hosting, Archiving and Indexing of Digital Resources and Assets), the comprehensive University of Padova Digital Asset Management System with long-term archiving, navigation and retrieval functionalities. Phaidra, formerly developed at the University of Vienna, is nowadays jointly implemented with a partnership between Padova and Vienna Universities. In the project are involved scholars (for the description and scientific context of the digitized objects), librarians (for the census care, cataloging, definition of metadata, permanent links, scan quality, etc.), and iT people (for the platform features, including search engine, interoperability with other systems, the development of web-service possibilities, etc.)
With the same philosophy adopted for the wallcharts the University of Padova community is uploading in PHAIDRA, in digital format, many other goods of the Athenaeum, like historical and scientific collections, museum collections, ancient books, archives, etc. in order to have the possibility to see them in internet and to get an idea of the path followed from the University of Padova founding, in 1222, until today.

Catalog

Padova University Press

Promoting organisations

University of Padova

Scientific Committee

Laura Tallandini, Elena Canadelli