GLAM/Newsletter/June 2023/Contents/Italy report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue VI, June 2023

Italy report

TCI and Turin Academy of Science

2023 mission accomplished for TCI

The uploading of the 1000+ images that the Touring Club Italiano planned to share in 2023 on Wikimedia projects has been completed. The images are mainly about the documentation of the Italian environment in the mid-twentieth century, but there are several images that concern Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, and some agricultural or naturalistic themed shots of non-European countries.

This is the second part of a three-year project started in 2022 which deals with digitizing and sharing parts of the exceptional historical archive of Touring Club Italiano. In 2022 TCI published on Commons several historical maps made for Enciclopedia Treccani in 1930s and the whole Atlante Tematico d'Italia. TCI material currently totals 3 millions of views every month.

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Millon archive con Commons

The Academy of Sciences of Turin begun to share on Wikimedia Commons a first selection of photographs by Henry A. Millon], an art historian and expert on Italian Baroque and Renaissance architecture. Over 5,000 images of buildings and architectural drawings will be shared on Commons at the end of the project.

The fund is much larger, as explained on the Academy of Sciences website: 176 boxes, 30 notebooks and 9 drawers of slides, for over two thousand photographs and sixteen thousand slides which was delivered from the National Gallery of Art in Washington to Turin.

Elena Borgi, director of the Academy, explains:

In 2017 Henry A. Millon decided to donate to the Turin Academy of Sciences – of which he was a member since 1978 – his archives. We choose to digitize these materials for several reasons: to protect them, make them usable and enhance them. Protect because photographs and slides are very sensitive to thermal and hygrometric conditions, as well as mechanical damage due to consultation. Fruition depends from the use of obsolete and uncommon tools, that are needed to view slides; sharing photos online can lead to a better use of these contents which, closed in an archive, would be meaningless.

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