Digitizing the Archives of the Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice

The overall aim of this project was to design a digitization process that would efficiently extract all the useful and important information about restoration records contained in the paper archive of the Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice.The team selected a representative sample of 5% of the paper records to develop a final method for the extraction and digitization of relevant information from the archive. The test that was conducted suggested the use of cloud storage for the digital documents and allowed the team to estimate the extent of the total archive in 47,000 pages, which would take approximately two years to digitize for a total cost of around €95,000. By extracting relevant pieces of information from the scanned documents, the team demonstrated that the resulting system facilitates detailed analyses that reveal statistics and trends that were previously hidden in the paper archive.