Two Projects and a Thesaurus. Experiences in the Management, Descriptions and Indexing of Oral Sources

Abstract

The Istituto Centrale per i BeniSonori e Audiovisivi (ICBSA) has just finished, together with the Università degli Studi di Siena and Università degliStudi di Siena per stranieri, to  work on the project “Ti racconto in italiano” which focuses on providing different access points to audio resources collected between 1980’s and  2000's by ICBSA itself, as part of its mission to document Italian audio and audiovisual culture. The main aim of the project is to create tools which will enable scholars of social history, art and literature to use these sources as well as providing original material for foreign students to exercise their knowledge of Italian. In order to facilitate access it has been necessary to create finding aids such as indexes and thesauri. For this purpose ICBSA has started a collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale  Centrale di Firenze and the latter’s Nuovo Soggettario. This is not the first case of a project by insititutes of the Italian Ministry of Culture comprising the use of the Nuovo  Soggettario for the indexing of archival materials. Indeed, the Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana has already worked in this direction a few years ago when treating the so-called Straw archives.