Media 68

"Media 68" project
data base
Architecture of the
data base
Functional aspects
of the system
Mask for interrogating
the data base
"MEDIA '68" PROJECT
DATA BASE
The "Media '68" consortium, in collaboration with a pool of institutes and foundations owners and custodians of archives on the political, youth and student movements of the '60s and '70s of the XX century, has created a data base on the year 1968, accessible on Internet, to offer scholars and all those interested the possibility of querying on line a large archive for acquiring information, consulting documents, verifying research hypotheses.
The data base was organized bearing in mind, on the one hand, indications of the archival discipline, and on the other, foreseeable requirements of future users of this documentary and informative collection.
For this reason we have decided to construct two data bases able to respond to different requirements: an archival data base and a data base of documents/photos.
The first organizes information regarding the documentary collections preserved in some European archives; the second contains a large part of the most important documents of the French, Italian, German and Spanish '68 movement and about 1500 images. From a strictly archival viewpoint the methodological definition that has been decided on is aimed at keeping together the main bases of the subject with the new ferment and stimuli which have emerged from the archival world from its encounter with computer technology and settled in an increasingly intense international debate, which has put the theme of communicability and integrability of archival information at the centre of the attention of all the operators.
The main lines of the structure of the project derive from this definition:

full respect for the principle of the origin in the job of arrangement of the archive;

faithful reconstruction of the internal articulation of the documentation to be dealt with within a flexible hierarchical structure;

adoption of the collection of the norms and standards of description proposed by the International Council on Archives and identified by the acronym ISAD(G) (International Standard of Archival Description).

The first requisite required of a computer programme for managing these information typologies consists therefore in the capacity to respond to these disciplinary necessities, while also guaranteeing the possibility of carrying out the typical activities connected with a job of arranging and making an inventory (editing of guides for consultation, inventories, indexes, etc.), even using traditional media. A second series of projectual definitions derive from the analysis of the documentation to be dealt with. The archives that flow into the data base are private collections which must be dealt with in their specificity, safeguarding the unitariness of the collections, but describing in a standard way the information that they contain so that they can flow into a common data base, that will be easily accessible by the users on line.
The third series of questions, but by no means the least important, regards the size and ways of dealing with the documentation.
There are two questions to be considered on this point:

The flexibility of the level of analyticity in the description of the archival hierarchy, guaranteeing in any case the possibility of integrating in the data base the images (and/or the texts) of the documents being dealt with, at whatever level of indexing it is decided to reach.

The necessity of ensuring the maximum possible opening in access to the data base (charts, texts and images), in a way that is extensively separate from the place of physical conservation of the documents.

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