The letters within the Archivio Storico Ricordi collection can be seen as central to the archives, connecting, as they do, all the different entities within the ontological model that represents the archive's dataset. The richly descriptive texts provide intricate details of the relationships between people, places, theatres, performances, manuscripts and stage descriptions, recorded over two hundred years. The Digital Humanities Institute has created an innovative online editing workbench that allows staff at the Archivio Storico Ricordi to simultaneously edit the letters (both in English and Italian), whilst linking segments of letter text to existing entities within the database (or to create new entities).
The Digital Humanities Institute designed the workbench with regard to the working practices of the archival staff, developing use-cases for the type of functionality that they required from such a tool. The workbench is intended not only to enable efficient digitisation of the archive's letters, but also to create a dataset that provides the basis for a website that will allow the public to explore the rich network of relationships between entities. For example, a user might want to visualise all letters sent by Giacomo Puccini between the years 1891 - 1899, or letters where the opera “Aida” was mentioned, and where the topic of the letter was a payment or a contract.
This paper explores the importance of understanding an organisation's data model and working practices to create effective tools that support digitisation and the integration of new data into an existing dataset. The aim is to promote sustainability but also to allow data to be queried and visualised in ways that allow new insights into an archive's collection. This paper will conclude by considering the future for the Archivio Storico Ricordi, including approaches such as crowd-sourcing transcriptions.