Researching, mapping and promoting the cultural heritage of Florence and its territory

One of the most urgent challenges for European academic and cultural institutions is to promote an intelligent use of materials and resources available on the web, by implementing best practices of web archiving, and building scientifically valid databases which can have a positive social impact. This paper will present the theoretical and methodological framework of Eredità Culturali, an ongoing project that aims at answering this challenge by focusing on the Florentine cultural heritage. The first stage of Eredità Culturali consisted in surveying similar initiatives within the European research landscape and examining national and international cataloguing models and standards to build a data entry prototype that interacts with other systems. Hence, a flexible and open-access web platform has been designed to validate, preserve and consult cultural information from disparate data sets into a single archive. A geo-referenced information system has also been developed, in which four databases designed by the Department's research groups of Geography, Archaeology, Performing Arts and History of the Book will converge and make sound data available for both non-academic and professional audiences. The analytical investigation is integrated with original ways of dissemination that will facilitate historical connections between different cultural heritages and legacies.