Proposal a Data Base of the National Artistic Heritage

The conservation, restoration and valorization of Italy's national, cultural-artistic heritage depends on the Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Heritage. In the past, efforts have been made by various offices of the Ministry and also local Authorities to promote the creation of catalogs of archaeological objects, works of art, monuments, monumental buildings, etc. These catalogs are important tools in improving the knowledge, utilization and conservation of the artistic material and in the progress of historic-critical researches. These efforts resulted in the adoption of standardized cards by which every work of art "lato sensu" could be completely described. Due to the large amount of material involved in the cataloguing process, this solution proved to be inadeguate to ensure fast access to and rapid dissemination of information. Attention was, therefore, given to the developing of a computer-based catalog. The project being conducted at CNUCE in collaboration with the Institute for the Catalog and Documentation of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, is divided into two parts: a) identification of the cataloguing needs and elaboration of cataloguing procedures, using computers, for the handling and dissemination of information b) study, design and implementation of a sufficiently meaningful experimental data base model for artistic heritage.