Not Just Paper: Enhancement of Archive Cultural Heritage

Oral archives and digital technologies have gone hand-in-hand for a very long time. Both sides benefit from this interdisciplinary junction: technology enhances the preservation and diffusion of oral materials, while exploiting them to develop cutting-edge tools for their treatment. This chapter deals with an Italian instantiation of this mutual relationship: the Archivio Vi.Vo. project. Offering innovative solutions concerning metadata, audio restoration, description, and access, Archivio Vi.Vo. aims to build an online platform to host the oral archives from Tuscany. The project is powered by CLARIN-IT, which guarantees its compliance with standards and offers resources for data access and discoverability. Archivio Vi.Vo. has not been built from scratch: it is instead a cross-fertilization of previous initiatives and research projects (e.g., the Gra.fo project). Moreover, the chapter presents the related, contemporary work of a multidisciplinary group striving to synthesize a Vademecum for future generations of oral archive researchers. Lastly, a brief list of tentative ideas for future developments of the Archivio Vi.Vo. platform will be presented.