National Diary Archive Foundation

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= "The Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale ... collects the diaries, letters and autobiographical memories of ordinary people".

URL = http://archiviodiari.org/

Description

"The Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive Foundation) is an award-winning public archive in the small Tuscan town of Pieve Santo Stefano. The Archive collects the diaries, letters and autobiographical memories of ordinary people. The Archive, and its adjacent museum, brilliantly illuminates a revealing slice of the history of Italy and its people. It has collected over 7,500 stories that cross local and national borders. The universal power of stories and the bottom up approach to culture and knowledge building, together with the "glocal" aspect of the Archive, makes it one of the world's most innovative archives." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/italian-diary-archive-rewrites-history-from-the-bottom-up-through-a-personal-story-commons)


Interview

Natalia Cangi and Loretta Veri, the Archive’s director and fundraiser interviewed by Alessia Clusini:


* Alessia Clusini: What did the project’s founder, Saverio Tutino, originally envision for the National Archive of Diaries?

Natalia Cangi: The original idea consists of giving a home to common people’s stories, by creating a memory archive where all people have the chance to send in a trace of their own lives. Saverio Tutino decided to create a very democratic place where ordinary folk have a special spot.


* How did he start this personal story collection and how does the team keep it going?

NC: Together with the idea of the Archive was born Premio Pieve (Pieve Prize), a national contest Saverio launched to choose the “best” (we can’t actually talk about the absolute best, because all the stories are extremely important) within the autobiographies, diaries, letters collections and memoirs that people would send to the Archive.

In this way, he thought it would be easier to convince people to donate and share their own personal stories in a public space with a vast audience. So Premio Pieve was the first form of propeller for personal story sharing within an audience that wasn’t used to it.

Back in 1984, before the blogging and social media boom, sharing personal lives and content wasn’t such a mainstream phenomena. An onset of awareness was needed within the common people—not writers or professionals in cultural fields—in order to share parts of their lives or those of their relatives. Today, Premio Pieve remains the most important incentive for people to send their memories to the Archive. Year after year, it’s a sort of public piazza where the stories come to life again, and many people come from all over the world to see it. The team works hard to communicate and logistically manage the memory, both online and offline.


* What makes Saverio Tutino a pioneer of the bottom-up approach to knowledge and cultural heritage?

NC: Tutino’s archive idea has a lot of political value in itself: he wanted to give a voice to those that don’t have it, telling history through common stories, in a bottom-up approach. Tutino was the one saving them from oblivion, and thinking beyond the idea of a library or a mere deposit. He used the word “vivaio” (nursery), meaning the place where new lives grow and develop. So our job—to give value to the little plants, lives, stories—consists of giving them new life, while respecting them and their authors.

Giving value to the stories means, certainly, maintaining and protecting them (we are in the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape), and besides that it means facilitating the diffusion of the Archive concept into as many fields as possible: we still do that by publishing the stories as we used to, but we also do it by investing in complex and innovative projects, such as the Impronte Digitali (Finger Prints) project, funded by Fondazione Telecom, through which we’re digitizing all the memory heritage in order to share it with a vast community and to make it live forever.


...


* How is the Archive working on the “knowledge as commons” aspect?

NC: The Archive has had, since the very beginning, a very contemporary approach to content sharing, giving to the authors all the power and the rights of their stories, while preserving and communicating them. We don’t own the stories—we share the stories, when the authors want that. We tend to let the stories speak for themselves, with no critical intermediation, and we work really hard to make this culture accessible to everybody, both in the academic and non-academic world. The Archive model is open source and we welcome everybody from anywhere in the world, seven days a week, for free (group tours offered for a small fee)." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/italian-diary-archive-rewrites-history-from-the-bottom-up-through-a-personal-story-commons)