The reorganization of the documental archives of the Montevecchio mine has been carried out with the funds assigned to the Regional Operational Programmes relatves to the Cultural Parc "Giuseppe Dessì". It started on October 2004 and it is icluded in a more general programme whose purpose is the realization of several projects such as the restoration of the mining buildings, the creation of thematic itineraries for turists, the rievocation of the daily life during the mining activity by the staging of several scenarios, the realization of films and the utilization of peculiar sounding and visual suggestions inside the mining structures, the setting up of different museums, and the valorisation of the entire mining patrimony, on naturalistic, historical and cultural terms.

One of the main goals of this project is to satisfy the visitors even with a concrete information service. In particular, we would like to make possible a real contact with the sources and the documents of the mining society by the consultation service of the historical mining archives. The project includes the reorganization and the inventory of the documents produced by the Montevecchio mine which are kept inside the manager's office building. It also includes the digitalization of the cartographical partimony for which the most substancial part of the funds has been employed. Up to now, the whole documentation produced by the old geological office of the mine has already been reorganized. This has been done by the elaboration of about 5000 bibliographical and cartographical files which give a complete description of the archives of this office during its activity. These files have been inserted into a database and organized in series and sub-series in order to make possible the consultation on line by a keyword research.

The Montevecchio mining archives keep a lot of documents which are in different conditions. Some of them have actually a too large size and, many athers are too old or fragile. These conditions make the consultation really hard. They represent a very important part of the whole archives, that is the reason why our purpose is to give to customers the possibility to consult these documents as easily as possible. Inserting these archives into a database finds two main reasons, protecting the original documents and giveing their complete availability for the informatic consultation. During the process of digitalization, the characteristics of the documents, their conditions, and the necessity to use a unique method to acqire and file them obliged us to follow a particular procedure. The most part of the cartographical documentation is made up of large size drawings (A0 format). That is the reason why we needed a special technique to compress and process them. Indeed, it was really important to guarantee the easy utilization and the good legibility of the files that had just been created. For that reason, high resolution master files have been produced and then compressed. This has caused a loss of their quality, but this has made their insertion into the web easier. Then, the quality of the images have been improved in order to guarantee the best legibility. The copy of the master file makes possible to obtain files of different sizes according to their use and the reproduction needs. The reorganization of the documental and cartographical archives of the Montevecchio mine will give to students and researchers an important instrument for their work. It will also lay the foundations for the realization of several expositions and demonstrations. Moreover, the archive itself is a point of great cultural interest.