Collections of personal documents: a study on research and enhancement

Abstract

Personal collections often consist of documents that differ in nature, purpose and use. Records, books that become ‘records’ themselves, and items that belonged to a person, constitute a unique collection of personal documents. Such collections are often scattered from the start, or else they are managed separately by the institutions that acquire them. Regardless of their subject areas, scholars are interested in documents as a whole and the research interest lies not only in correctly describing and identifying documents, but also in contextualizing documents, i.e. examining the bonds with the other documents of the collection.
The aim of this study is to define the nature of these collections, highlighting research needs and identifying the features required by computer tools to be able to meet those needs, deriving and enriching institutional data, linking the information recorded in management systems to the content of the documents of the collection, re-creating existing relationships and enabling the researcher to discover new and unexpected relationships. This study considers in the first instance the number of personal collections acquired over time by the University of Milan, while considering the opportunity to extend the project to other institutions.