Integrated digital archive: bibliographical services, historical lexicography

The project concerns specific achievements connected with three strategic centres of the Accademia:

• Library. Unification of the two catalogues online
  Thanks to a previous financing from the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, the Library of the Accademia converted its card catalogue to electronic format, through an intermediate solution with the consultation of two different databases: the current catalogue, starting from 1993, and the retrospective catalogue up to 1992. With this project both catalogues have been unified in one database allowing the consultation of the whole Library heritage with one single access. The main search keys (author, title, subject etc.), some types of material and some links between bibliographical descriptions have been reassessed for the unification, as well as the visualization of results in the OPAC, the access page to the catalogue and the consultation of collection catalogues.
   
• Archive. Creation of an online inventory of the documents related with the first edition of the Vocabolario (1612)
  The first stage for the analysis of historical archives, namely the preparation of a consultation guide that identifies, recreates and describes the documentary series, was completed in the first months of 2006. Later, the real inventory, searchable online, was drafted - with changes made to the computer programme already in use - in order to make it available for future procedures. The inventory provides an in-depth description of the single series, analysing in detail each archive unit, that is, each series of documents grouped together with an organic link (string, issue, volume etc), for cataloguing purposes.
  463 archive series, subseries and units about material from the period between the foundation of the Accademia and the publication of the first edition of the Vocabolario in 1612 are searchable on the website of the Accademia. The entries can be searched with a software planned and created by the Accademia computer centre. The access is open to all users with field-of-use limitations.
   
• Computer centre and website. Creation of a database of newspaper texts 
  A lexical database consisting of 4790 entries of new words derived from the electronic scrutiny of texts provided by the Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera Foundation (1992-2005) and from the comparison with the electronic editions of the main Italian dictionaries. The 4790 entries are grouped together in a database that can be searched by word, by year of first appearance and possible disappearance, by field of use.
  Each entry includes the frequency of the word in the corpus and the whole text of the article, the data on co-occurrences within the sentence and the article, the subject (deduced from the specific section of the newspaper: economy etc...), the distribution of the frequency per month.
  It is also possible to do a quick search on all fields and therefore also on those articles that include at least one of the 4790 filtered words.