Heritage Lab, the laboratory of knowledge, experimentation and innovation applied to Italgas‘ historical and cultural heritage, has a new digital home:
The website aims to tell the stories of businesses, achievements and common people throughout the 19th- and 20th-centuries in Italy. Historical research, description of documents and new technological tools made Heritage Lab’s mission tangible: to create knowledge, to protect cultural heritage, and to preserve memory with digitization and data sharing.
Italgas Historical Archive consists of 3 linear kilometers of documentation, dating from 1288 to 1990, including papers, business registers related to gas production and distribution, maps, posters, films, photos and parchments. An immense resource of big data that becomes available online through digital transformation, to historians, researchers and the curious around the world.
Heritage Lab’s campaign of digitization responds to one of the common factors of the UN’s Agenda: making information more accessible. Digitizing brings two worlds together: the world of data that is already available online and the analogue world of archives. Heritage Lab is proposed as an ideal bridge between past and future, between history and innovation, in order to create value and shared memory with territories and communities.
“At first, the digital world and the materials housed within the Heritage Lab” – commented Chiara Ganz, head of External Relations and Sustainability at Italgas – ” may seem at odds with each other. But it’s just an appearance: the challenge of digital transformation is to create a connection between the two, in order to enhance an history, which is not only that of Italgas, but of the entire country. Heritage Lab is another important part of the digitization effort that is happening in our Group: within it, innovation is not only applied but created and, through the new portal, we will make knowledge more accessible to everyone in the awareness that there is no future without memory.”