The meeting took place at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, with the participation, among others, of Martina Bagnoli, the Director of the Galleria and Biblioteca Estense in Modena, Paolo Cavicchioli, President of the Cassa di Risparmio Modena Foundation and Luca Panini, Managing Director of the publishing company Franco Cosimo Panini Editore.

 The Franco Cosimo Panini Company will lead this ambitious promotion of the Biblioteca Estense’s collection, in collaboration with Haltadefinzione and Memooria.org, as well as Hyperborea, MLOL/Horizons Unlimited and Mida Informatica.

 This project’s key goals are as follows: high definition scanning and digitalization of 240,000 pages, the creation of a digital platform, content enhancement, the compilation of metadata, and the collection of all previous digitalizations. In the process, more than one terabyte of previous digitalizations and many documents of Modenese history from digital libraries all over the world, will be made accessible to scholars and to anyone, anywhere, interested in history, the arts, and our cultural heritage. 

 Finally, the project will also include the complete digitalization (including metadata) of three collections in the Biblioteca Estense: the Fondo Muratoriano, containing handwritten documents from the historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), the Geographical Maps collection and the Music collection. In the next few weeks, a multidisciplinary team of engineers, humanists, conservation scientists and restorers will begin their work, to shed light on many precious documents that are held there.