Digitalization projects

Internationally, the last few years have seen the flourishing of increasingly numerous projects for the digitization of cultural heritage and the emergence of platforms for their preservation and the provision of a non-local public, potentially from all over the world. A particularly significant example is the Europeana platform, which today brings together more than 50 million entries from libraries, museums and archives across Europe.

The digitalization of ancient and valuable material and documents of particular historical and artistic interest allows, among other things, the value of the heritage to be enhanced, as well as offering easier access to documents (without limits of space and time) and limiting direct consultation of originals in a poor state of preservation or of difficult access. Another added value is the possibility of creating virtual collections including material of different types and formats and located in different sites.

The University of Padova Library System has also implemented and continues to implement numerous digitization projects of documents stored in libraries, museums, departments and centres, while offering support to projects of other institutions, such as the Biblioteca Universitaria di Padova.

For the archiving of documents and to make it possible for the end user to access, view, download and reuse them, the University of Padova Library System uses Phaidra (Permanent Hosting, Archiving and Indexing of Digital Resources and Assets), a platform for long-term archiving of digital objects and collections. In the platform, which currently hosts more than 360,000 digital objects, one can find ancient books, manuscripts, photographs, wall charts, maps, learning objects, videos, archive material and museum objects from libraries, museums and archives of the University of Padova, as well as the University Ca' Foscari and IUAV of Venice and other cooperating institutions.

THE DIGITALIZATION OF THE WORKS OF THE MARSILI COLLECTION

In the case of the exhibition on Giovanni Marsili, it was decided to proceed to the complete digitalization of all the works on display at the exhibition held at Palazzo Cavalli in 2018, followed by the editing of the files and the loading of volumes in Phaidra.

Thanks to these operations:

• visitors have the opportunity to browse through all the volumes, overcoming the limitation imposed by the physical exhibition, where only one page is visible. Some of the digitized books have also been incorporated into the pages of this virtual exhibition;
• it is possible to see better and analyze the details, even of small dimensions;
• a virtual collection has been created that brings together all these volumes, which will allow the unity of the original collection to be maintained, albeit only at the virtual level, which the physical exhibition intended to temporarily reconstruct. This collection, which can be constantly updated, can then be enriched in the future by other volumes from the Marsili collection, once again overcoming the limits imposed by a physical exhibition, where it would not have been possible to exhibit an overly large number of works.