The Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation (ICCD)

The Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation (ICCD), founded in 1975, is the reference institution for the development, the methodological elaboration and the planning of projects and activities connected to the cataloguing of Italian cultural heritage.

The ICCD promotes and co-ordinates the executive cataloguing activity which consists in unifying and diffusing methods through: elaboration of cataloguing methodologies; constitution and management of the catalogue's informative system of environmental, architectural, archaeological, artistic and demo-anthropological resources; predisposition of special checking instruments to validate data; realisation of cultural projects with national and international institutions.

The ICCD General Catalogue of the Environmental, Architectural, Archaeological, Artistic, Historical, and Demo-anthropological Heritage, collects and co-ordinates the results of cataloguing campaigns carried out by the Superintendence offices, the Central Institutes and the Public Museums internal to the Ministry, Regional and local Authorities, Ecclesiastical Entities, Special institutions and licensed agencies that have carried out cataloguing projects promoted with special laws.

The great and branched territorial diffusion of the cataloguing activity, allowed the ICCD to pick up in its archive, about 3,800,000 paper cards with their specific documentation (graphics, photographic, cartographic) transmitted to the institute at the end of expected office procedures for each single administration. The main core of the archive consists of cataloguing cards compiled between 1969 and 1992. There is also an historical archive of about 250,000 cards collected between 1892 and 1969, of noteworthy documentary and catalographic interest. In the Italian cataloguing methodology there are different models of card according to the different typologies of examined goods: mobile resources, immovable resources, urban-territorial resources, demo-anthropological resources.

The first studies about the automation of the data stored in the Catalogue started in 1980 and since then the office of ICCD, called Data Elaboration Centre (CED), has always worked in this direction defining rules, standards and controlled vocabularies. Thanks to these efforts today most of the catalographic data and images are transferred from the branch institutes of ICCD directly onto electronic media, while paper format cards have gradually been transformed into a digital format. Today ICCD multimedia database stores, at a central level, automated cards that, for the time being, amount over 1,600,000 and 800,000 co-related images. While the progressive conversion of the 3,800,000 paper cards in digital format is underway.

The ICCD manages the Informative System of the cultural heritage, establishes the rules which regulate it, aggregates all the information and validates the whole cataloguing process (methodology of research, cataloguing standards, informative programming). The purposes of the Information System of Cataloguing are to warrant: scientific quality of catalographic data in fundamental components, alignment of data in different data bases of the territory, interchange and the free use of catalographic data between different national and international Organisations. This informative system, at the moment being in an advanced stage of development, will allow the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and its peripheral organisms not only to solve the problems of custody and management of cultural heritage in a better way but also to valorise it-self.

The ICCD's organic structure also comprises the National Photographic Library, whose wealth may be estimated in nearly 400,000 photographs, together with negatives, divided into a number of funds or thematic areas, as well as photographs of which only positive prints are available, amounting to a total of nearly 1,000,000 photographs. Such a Photographic Library represents the major public collection of photographs existing in Italy. The quality of the photographs is extremely high, being the work of leading photographers working from the end of the 19th Century to the early 20th Century.