DIGITsmart Technical and Steering Committee Meeting: Insights from Cesena
18/07/2024
On May 7, 2024, DIGITsmart project hosted its Forth technical and steering committee meeting, attended in person in Cesena, Italy by project partners.
The session focused on financial/admin matters, project advancements, and validation of deliverables.
Malatestiana Library
During the visit to the Malatestiana Library all partners gained interesting information about the history of the Library.
The Malatestiana Library is the only example of a conventual humanistic library perfectly preserved in its building, furnishings and book collection, as UNESCO recognized, including it, the first in Italy, in the Register of the Memoire du Monde.
Paolo Zanfini, scientific director of the Malatestiana Library, made an interesting speech on the digitization process of the Malatestiana Library sector. This Library, in fact, contains an enormous number of extremely ancient and valuable manuscripts, catalogs and iconographies. He explained that the digitization project of the codices of the Malatesta Library has been implemented thanks to the "Open Catalog of Malatesta Manuscripts," which allows users to browse online through all the codices of the Malatestiana, the Piana, and the chorales of the Duomo and Bessarione. The open catalog of Malatesta manuscripts is accessible from the portal of the Province of Forlì-Cesena, with direct access from the new web page of the Isistenza Biblioteca Malatestiana (http://www.malatestiana.it).
In this case, the need was to enable Italian and non-Italian users to have access to these documents quickly. In addition, it was necessary to preserve the integrity of these documents, which are always subject to the wear and tear of time.
Digitization of documents in Municipality Cesena
Simona Saporetti, representative of the construction sector of the municipality of Cesena, delivered an interesting presentation of the sector's transformative process. The municipality of Cesena has a paper archive of building practices containing over 150,000 files dating back to 1957, while those prior to that date are preserved and managed by the State Archives of Cesena. The archive is located in various locations in the city, and its preservation and consultation therefore require a considerable amount of time and personnel; this element takes on even more significance when one considers that the number of requests for viewing/extraction of copies of construction files that were received by the Building Sector between 2014 and 2019 was 17,348. We can say that the archive is therefore subject to very frequent consultations that sometimes even result in the loss of documents.
Gratitude to all partners for their unwavering commitment!