Italgas – Archiving heritage

In 2021, Italgas (Italy’s main gas provider founded in 1837) partnered with ARCHiVe to record and share online its historical archive: a multi-layered and complex collection of documents, pictures, historical papers and essays, scientific journals and texts. To achieve this, a custom Replica 360 Recto/Verso, a recording system developed by Factum Arte and Foundation, was installed in October 2021 inside Heritage Lab, a dedicated space within the Italgas headquarters in Turin.

The Replica 360 Recto/Verso Scanner installed at Heritage Lab © Factum Foundation

The Replica 360 Recto/Verso Scanner was originally designed for the rapid digitisation of the vast photo archive belonging to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and has been successfully operating since its installation in
Venice in 2018. It is designed as a rotary table that moves continuously during a digitisation session run by two operators, simultaneously photographing both sides of single-page documents and automatically downloading the images onto a computer.

After a training session carried out by the Factum team, the Replica started the digitisation program in the Italgas Heritage Lab at the end of 2021. In November 2022, Italgas launched the Heritage Lab website, where readers can browse almost 900,000 digitised documents for free. Among these are archive papers and bank records of Jewish people, digitised in collaboration with the Fondazione Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) to preserve historical documents of anti-semitic persecutions during the Fascist era.