The New Digital Showcase Is Online: 500 Documents Are Already Available to Everyone

The new version of the digital showcase, the innovative tool that preserves and makes available to everyone the native digital documents and digitisations of paper documents relating to modern publications and ancient documents, and produced by the Istituto degli Innocenti in the course of its activities is now online. The showcase ensures the preservation, popularisation, and online consultation of these materials, serving as a valuable documentary resource for professionals in the fields where the Institute has been active for over six hundred years. It is also accessible to the general public and those interested in topics related to childhood and adolescence.

What’s in the new digital showcase: from ancient to modern

The digital showcase preserves and makes available to the public digitised paper documents produced by the Istituto degli Innocenti, which refer to both modern publications and ancient documents. The modern collection consists of volumes, brochures, videos and grey literature on studies, research, projects and events that the Institute has organised for over twenty-five years to support children's policies. The ancient collection refers to historical documents of particular interest to reconstruct the history of the reception and care of abandoned children at the Innocenti, to photographs from the early 20^th century documenting its activities, and to a selection of tokens, i.e., the objects left by parents in the swaddling clothes of infants when they were entrusted to the Institute.

Eight sections

The documentation in the new digital showcase is organised in eight sections: Editorial Series; Journals; Studies and Research; Action Plans and Monitoring Reports; Specific Projects; Historical Documents; Information Materials; Seminars, Conferences and Exhibitions.

Within the eight sections, there are a total of 61 collections containing over 500 documents to date. However, the implementation of the collections and documents is ongoing as it follows the documentary production of the Institute. The home page of the showcase contains a table of contents, which provides a general and immediate overview of the sections and collections within the platform. In the showcase, it is possible to search within each collection, or across all collections simultaneously, consult the documents, and download the PDFs.

The volumes of the new series produced by the Institute - Infanzia e adolescenza agli Innocenti (Childhood and Adolescence at the Innocenti) and Archivio e museo degli Innocenti (Archive and the Innocenti Museum) - and the reports produced for the National Documentation and Analysis Centre for Childhood and Adolescence and the Regional Documentation and Analysis Centres for Childhood and Adolescence are some of the most recent publications. With the Historical Documents section, the Institute has begun the digitisation of its archival heritage, starting with the Libri della muraglia, one of the series bearing witness to the foundation of the historical hospital.

The collection dedicated to the gettatelli (abandoned children)

The Historical Documents section also includes historical photos of the Institute and the collection of the Gettatelli’s tokens, the objects, often split in half, left by parents between their swaddling clothes or hung around their children’s necks so that they could one day recognise them and take them back. To date, the collection includes the tokens that have been “adopted” thanks to the Adotta un segnale (Adopt a Token) campaign, promoted by the Foundation Istituto degli Innocenti E.T.S. to support the digitisation of the more than 40,000 tokens owned by the Institute.