Vacuum Table Archives

April - June 2023

To celebrate the 40th birthday of the newspaper Il Giornale dell’Arte, founded by Umberto Allemandi in 1983, the Digital Centre ARCHiVe conducted specific digitisation tests and recorded 80 earlier issues of the newspaper.

Reference

the project

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its renowned publication Il Giornale dell’Arte, founded by Umberto Allemandi in 1983, Allemandi Editore decided to offer the public free online access to all past issues, complete with high-definition digital transcriptions of the texts.

Over the years, Il Giornale dell’Arte has expanded into a network of four interconnected newspapers, forming the world’s most authoritative system for art journalism: the Italian Il Giornale dell’Arte, the Anglo-American The Art Newspaper, the French Journal des Arts, and the Greek Ta Nea Tes Technis.

To make the newspaper’s archives available online as part of the 40th-anniversary celebrations, in April 2023, the Digital Centre ARCHiVe carried out a series of digitisation tests in preparation for the large-scale, high-definition digitisation of 80 copies of the oldest issues of Il Giornale dell’Arte from its archive, as well as more than 200 supplements.

objectives

All the 80 issues and their inserts were digitised to be freely available online, with a digital OCR-supported function to make the texts easily searchable.

Methodologies

1. Preliminary study and analysis of materials

Assessment of the state of the newspapers’ preservation and evaluation of the total number of pages in order to estimate time for the digitisation process;

2. Digitisation

Digitisation of the newspaper copies using the V-scanner for the ones in a good state of preservation and the Vacuum Surface for the ones needing particular attention due to deterioration of the paper and/or folding problems;

3. Post-production

File renaming and post-production (white balance, correction of optical distortion, chromatic aberration, and additional step required to apply masks for tonal adjustments and local corrections on pages shot by using two V-Scanner cameras);

4. Export

Exportation of .jpgs and creation of .pdf files combining both “Il Giornale dell’Arte” digital copies and all its additional issues;

5. OCR

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) was necessary to make .pdfs searchable. A compression of .pdf documents was also needed in order to reduce the files’ size and obtain optimised images for the web.

results

The 80 copies of the magazine, as well as their 220 additional issues, were digitised using high-resolution colour photography.

Following the post-processing phase, all the digital files were organised using different file formats: high-quality .JPG, lower quality .JPG, CR2 (raw digital photography file format), high-quality .PDF and compressed .PDF.

The OCR engine was then added to each PDF file.

Technologies

V Scanner

The V Scanner is a photographic set built within Fondazione Cini. Based on an open-access design and adapted to the needs of Cini's book collections, it is meant to acquire bound material quickly and [...]

Vacuum Table

The vacuum table is a system for acquiring two-dimensional documents. Created within Fondazione Cini, gives a response to the need to digitise large-format documents, delicate, creased or folded. The [...]

2018 – 2023

Centro Studi del Vetro and ARCHiVe worked together on digitising and publishing online the entire Seguso Vetri d’Arte Archive, which contains thousands of projects attesting to the varied production of the artists and designers who collaborated with the glassworks from 1932 to 1973.

Reference

Centro Studi del Vetro | Fondazione Giorgio Cini

The project

The historic Seguso forge became a company in 1933, during a period of great innovation and manufacturing planning. During this period, in addition to artistic production, activities related to architectural projects also took off, both in the field of lighting and furnishing; glassworks became internationally recognised in the panorama of contemporary art. The Seguso Archive, arrived in 2012 to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and destined for the Centro Studi del Vetro, contains thousands of projects attesting to the varied production of the artists and designers who collaborated with the glassworks from 1932 to 1973.
The acquired corpus consists of 22,044 executive drawings and sketches, 25,296 photographs and about thirty production catalogues divided between Showroom catalogues (7 volumes, 1939-1971) with drawings of individual hand-made models, Lighting production catalogues (19 volumes) and Barbier order catalogues (5 volumes).

Objectives

The digitisation and cataloging project of the Seguso Vetri d’Arte Archive aims to enhance the documentary heritage, scientific research and dissemination of materials, thus meeting the criteria of consultation and preservation of original materials. Objectives of the project are also archival description and online publication of the archive.

Developments

1. Material analysis

Material analysis and creation of archival structure and first description

2. reorganisation

Photographic positives on paper: reorganisation

3. labelling

Drawings: cleaning, securing, conditioning and labelling

4. Digitization

Digitization of the entire Archive. 13,311 printed photographs digitised recto/verso for a total of 26,622 files, 22,479 large format drawings digitised double-sided for a total of 44,958 files and 255 very large format drawings (up to 4 metres) digitised recto/verso for a total of 510 files (100%) segmented with algorithms

5. Import

Import of data descriptions, metadata and digital images, solution of visualization problems

6. Automatic post production

Automatic post production of the series Illuminazione and Progetti Speciali: ARCHiVe created a new script for automatic post production based on this new dataset and it was launched in July 2022. This step comprehends the export in .jpg for the upload on the cataloging system (xDams) and the extraction of information such as the dimension of the document digitized