Digitization between conservation and valorization: application to manuscripts, incunabula and sixteenth century works

This contribution sets out the objectives and the first results achieved by MAGIC, a project born from the cooperation between the Department of Humanistic Studies and the "Ettore Pancini" Department of Physics of the University of Naples "Federico II" to create a Service Center for technologies applied to cultural heritage, in this case, for the management and processing of manuscripts, documents, ancient and printed texts, which aims at the preventive protection and conservation of cultural heritage, as well as its enhancement and use. The structuring of the intervention and the importance given to the digitization of manuscript material for conservation purposes are the objectives of the first phase of the project which dealt with the digitization of a nucleus of 280 illuminated manuscript codices of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, dating back to the between the 14th and 15th centuries and preserved in Italian and international museums, archives and libraries. This thematic digitization allows us to consult, at the moment, 101 illuminated manuscripts and have a precious open access virtual collection available to students, researchers and those interested in Comedy. A further phase of the project will focus on the library of the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples, focusing interest on a book collection, which includes 6 incunabula and 186 sixteenth-century works. Digitization is the first step in the use of modern technologies in new image storage formats. Particular attention is paid to the problem of long-term conservation and the use of the F.I.T.S. standard. which format designed by NASA in the 70s and which has as its main objective the long-term archiving, transmission and simplification of the use of the data thus saved; it has been declared by the Italian Standardization Body as a format that satisfies and ensures the long-term suitability of digital image conservation. We will proceed with the specific support of the Physics Department to study the state of conservation and related diagnostics of ancient manuscripts and volumes. The deterioration process of paper is largely due to the degradation of cellulose, which represents its main constituent. Given the high number of possible degradation phenomena, it is essential to use techniques and procedures to monitor the progress of degradation, identify the causes and act preventively to ensure that this does not happen. The FT-IR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy) spectroscopic technique is particularly suitable for this type of application, thanks to the possibility of dating and identifying the composition of paper supports, distinguishing different types of paper from each other and studying their degradation and deterioration processes.