The Italian and Vatican Experience to Digitize the Astronomical Photographic Archives

A great amount of highly valuable information is stored in the photographic archives of many Italian Observatories and in the Specola Vaticana, with approximately 70.000 plates dating from the end of the XIX Century until 1998. This paper presents a large-scale project to digitize these archives of plates. Identical systems, composed by a commercial flat-bed retro-illuminated scanner plus a dedicated personal computer and acquisition software, have been installed in all participating Institutes, namely Padova-Asiago, Rome University, Rome Monte Porzio, Torino, Catania. In addition to the process of digitization, the overall project aims to a precise inventory of the still useable material and its storage in appropriate conditioned rooms, to the digitization of all the logbooks, to the provision of high quality BVRI CCD sequences in selected fields with the Campo Imperatore telescopes, and finally to the distribution of the digitized information to all interested researchers via the international Web.