Mart lands on the world's leading digital library

The Mart of Rovereto enters the world’s most important digital library, Internet Archive. It is the second Italian museum to do so after Centro Pecci, which entered in January 2021 with its specialized library, CID/Visual Arts.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle with the goal of giving everyone access to knowledge, archive.org is a nonprofit digital library that offers its users, free of charge, more than 30 million digitized books and journals, as well as millions of other documents, such as movies, audio tracks and software programs. The archive.org servers are in San Francisco, but they have a mirror, that is, an exact copy of the content, in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.

In line with this goal, the Mart has created an institutional account in which to place part of its archival holdings. The project is curated by theArchivio del ’900, a research center of the museum in Rovereto, consisting of the historical archives and specialized library that hold tens of thousands of documents.

To begin, it was decided to start with theFuturist Avant-Garde, that is, with the digitization of the Manifesto of Futurism and more than fifty works by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

In this freely searchable Marinetti anthology are pre-Futurist texts, such as Gabriele d’Annunzio intime (1903); propaganda writings from the early 1940s, such as La poesia sublime dell’esercito italiano (1942); masterpieces of Futurist typography such as Zang tumb tuuum (1914) or Les mots en liberté futuristes (1919), the latter work also documented in the Czech-language edition of 1922, which has numerous differences from the French edition in the composition of the famous parolibere plates that open into the pages like small, precious posters. All editions come from the library of theNew Writing Archive, founded in 1988 by collector Paolo Della Grazia and donated to the Mart in 2019.

To facilitate online consultation, the bibliographical records for these works already included in the Trentino Bibliographic Catalog have direct cross-references to the digital version, in a cross-reference between databases that promotes the availability of heritages.

The library editions of the Archives of the 20th Century present on the Internet Archive are not only searchable online; they are in fact searchable through various modalities, including lexicographic: the texts uploaded to the platform are automatically transformed into numerous formats and processed by an automatic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that thus makes it possible to search for words, names, dates and phrases within individual texts or, if necessary, all the texts uploaded to the Mart - Archivio del ’900 page.

The project is constantly being updated. The archivists and researchers of the Archivio del ’900 are already working on new projects that will cover both the historical avant-garde, particularly Futurism, and the second twentieth century.

At this address you can access the Mart’s page on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/mart-archivio-del-900

Mart lands on the world's leading digital library

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