The website “Scipione Piattoli’s Papers and Notes” is the outcome of preliminary work to order this archival resource and release its holdings for use. The numbers and order assigned to the documents are a direct reflection of their physical collocation in the extant collection. At this stage of the work no ordering criteria have been adopted (such as chronology, theme, language or place of origin), as without more in-depth study these could be misleading and suggest risky hypotheses. As it is, perusing the documents in the order proposed will be equivalent to perusing the contents of a series of boxes and files.
This seemed to be the optimum solution, because it also gives scholars a search engine permitting the identification of particular groups of documents which may prove especially interesting for specific investigations. It will enable the rapid location of documents across the archive meeting selected criteria. Searches by the content of the “Description” field permit the ordering of the documents into groups (e.g. by language of the original, place of origin, or theme), and also implementation of the chronological criterion.
The set of key words is given in the relevant tab. It is important to note, however, that for many documents it was impossible to establish either the date or place of origin, and in such cases the search engine may not fulfil its role. It is also possible to search using a list of the documents and their titles, under the tab “list of documents”.
For selected documents scholars will also find photographs showing visible watermarks.
The majority of the functions available in the database were designed to work intuitively (e.g. proceeding to successive pages within a document, or to successive documents, enlarging, scrolling, rotating, increasing contrast, moving to descriptions, etc.)
Digital copies of documents are available. On the issue of reproduction rights please contact the Polish Academy of Sciences Research Centre in Rome. We also welcome all remarks and comments.