'Grey crossroads' in cultural heritage preservation and resource management.

Abstract

Among the assets that make up the cultural heritage of a country, a special place is assigned to the internal documents produced by organs and entities belonging to the Public Administration. In the public sector, for example, the minutes of meetings of the Boards of Directors are considered historical documents and as such are preserved in the for a long time. Actually from them it is possible to gain insight about the genesis of important decisions which affected the lives of many people. In some countries there is a legal obligation to deposit those documents in long term digital preservation systems, which adhere to ad hoc defined standards. In our opinion, many of those documents can be reckoned as grey literature assets and, beyond “plain and simple” preservation, some additional measures may be deployed in order to extract information and insights from them. In this paper we illustrate a process to collect those assets, cleanse and enrich their metadata and then store them in ad hoc defined data marts, upon which Business Intelligence tools can be used for data navigation and analysis. We finally show some examples of insights that may be acquired from such analysis.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notesXAInternationa