Gestione, conservazione e valorizzazione delle immagini digitali del patrimonio culturale ecclesiastico

Database building and enrichment processes of the past decades, in progress and still ongoing, highlight the ever-increasing importance of their sound and systematic management. Alongside the traditional and consolidated cataloguing of heritage data, based on nationally and internationally shared standards and formats, managing cultural heritage today involves, inter alia, a wealth of resources that differ in terms of record, content, reference standards, methodological approaches, accessibility and user expectations.  

In this context, digitisation is a crucial tool for the conservation and protection of cultural heritage and its dissemination throughout the community. The Catholic Church in Italy spearheaded the documentation of its cultural heritage records decades ago, thereby facing the challenge posed by the management of extensive collections relating to a variety of cultural heritage sectors, serving a variety of purposes.

Likewise, the Catholic Church in Italy today intends to play a leading role in the digital transformation of ecclesiastical cultural heritage - in accordance with the National Plan for the Digitisation of Cultural Heritage promoted by the Central Institute for the digitisation of cultural heritage – Digital Library of the Ministry of Culture. Among the first steps made so far, figures the publication of Guidelines for ecclesiastical heritage digitisation projects: recommendations and good practices, designed to ensure proper and standardised approaches, while guaranteeing optimum quality levels characterising the numerous digitisation projects at territorial level. The document outlines the solutions set out in the guidelines and illustrates the digital repository under construction within BeWeB (portal of cultural ecclesiastical heritage), where all digital and digitised materials will be stored in order to facilitate their consultation and use, with archival documentation images uploaded as of December 2021 according to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), accessible via the Mirador3 image viewer and the Universal Viewer.