Cooperation agreement among the Archivio Storico della Pontificia Università Gregoriana, the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” - CNR (Pisa) and the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale for the use of Open Source Web Applications Pinakes 3.0 and Pinakes Text in the digitization and catalogue different types of documents belonging to historical and modern collections of the Archivio Storico della Pontificia Università Gregoriana.

The collaboration will lead to the development and launch of the process of digitization of documents in compliance with international standards, using an information structure for safety data and for long-term conservation. It will also create the digital archive in which all stored data (images, texts and transcripts, and descriptive metadata cataloging cards) will be managed by Pinakes 3.0 concerning issues of cataloging and by Pinakes Text for the management of the texts in both image and transcription formats.

Pinakes 3.0 and Pinakes Text will be used for Digital online edition of Ferdinand de Saussure's manuscripts, thanks to an agreement for scientific collaboration among the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale and the PRIN Research Unit of the Dipartimento di Filosofia - University of Calabria, of the Dipartimento di Linguistica - University of Firenze, of the Dipartimento di Studi Linguisitici e Letterari - University of Salerno and of the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” - CNR (Pisa).

Pinakes 3.0 and Pinakes Text are Web applications that provide functionality for storing the texts in the form of images and transcriptions, analysis and research tools, annotation and commentary, needed to make, even in a collaborative way, the study and the production of critical editions.

The Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale is a partner of the European project PersID.  A guaranteed access to digital publications and other electronic resources over time is an important aspect of the scientific and cultural heritage domains. It requires an unambiguous identification of digital objects.

Ten national organisations in eight European countries combine their expertise in the PersID initiative to establish an infrastructure for Persistent Identifiers. This infrastructure must be open, interoperable, trusted and controlled by all actors in the research and cultural heritage community – and capable to incorporate other global identifier initiatives. There are many ways to set up such an infrastructure. The partners have chosen to use "Uniform Resource Names for National Bibliography Numbers" URN:NBN as we regard this to be the most open and versatile system. It is able to  accommodate existing national URN:NBN identifier schemes as well as other systems (DOI, Handle, ARK, etc.) within the overall URN scheme, using proven methods and technologies in an open and transparent way. The project will provide a shared Persistent Identifier resolver service which will be able to resolve requests to local URNs but also to other Persistent Identifiers. The first prototype of the service will be available next autumn.

The course, developed in collaboration with MartLab-VivaVoce, exposes, in a popular way and at the same time technically rigorous, the problems and the potential solutions for preservation and enhancement of audio-visual through the use of information technology. The course is addressed at professionals who have responsibility for the maintenance and the management of sound archives.

The criticality of the small archives require different skills and technologies, also historical, to identify and understand the operations and the characteristics of little-used equipment. Professionals also need good technical knowledge of the digitization process.

The topics covered are:

• historical introduction on the most popular audio supports
• causes of degradation and measures to be taken for recovery and preservation of:
  • tapes
  • discs
  • CDs and DVDs
• digitization process: procedures and good practice to recover the maximum of the original information content
• how to create a small / medium digital archive: procedures for access and maintenance
• advantages and disadvantages of proprietary and open formats.

The free demo version of the course offers a preview of some topics.

The Centre VivaVoce focuses on the experience gained in the field of preservation and enhancement of sound recordings of MARTLab - Conservatorio di Musica “L. Cherubini”, Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, ISTI - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Fondazione Mediateca Regionale Toscana, RAI Sede Regionale della Toscana. This enables to provide to cultural operators of audiovisual tools the skills and the experience they need to achieve the digitization, preservation and enhancement processes of sound files.

Among other tasks, it has taken on charges for:

• recovery of the collection of images obtained thanks to the digitization of manuscripts and reproductions of Dante Alighieri' works preserved at the Società Dantesca Italiana (Firenze). Images are stored on approximately 300 optical media, mostly of them compact discs (CD-R) and tens of Digital Versatile Disc (DVD ± R) that are heterogeneus concerning brand name, model, type and origin. During the first phases of the work it was clear that the level of degrade of the optical supports was heterogeneus: although at first sight the disks seemed to be often in excellent condition, the degrade of the organic substrates due to temperature, humidity and contaminants (not least the glue used in labels), shows itself in the total or partial impossibility to access the recorded digital contents on the disks. At the moment, the use of technologies and equipments for professional reading has allowed to recover approximately 90% of the contents
• the digitization of the audio tapes' collection of the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana' Sound Archive. The Sound Archive is a tape library consisting of over than 400 audio tapes (compact cassettes) containing a collection of oral witnesses of Antifascismo and Resistenza' protagonists.