The Generali Historical Archive for the University of Trieste

On October 6 and 7, 2025, the conference “Le intelligenze artificiali nei luoghi della cultura” (Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Spaces) was held in Gorizia, at the Conference Center of the University of Trieste campus, organized by the Sistema Museale di Ateneo (smaTs) (university museum system) and the Friuli Venezia Giulia coordinating body of MAB (Musei Archivi Biblioteche) (museums, archives, libraries).

The conference aimed to explore the role of AI in the preservation, management, and promotion of cultural heritage, through contributions from MAB representatives, university professors and lecturers from various disciplines, entrepreneurs, and managers of public and private cultural institutions.

The event concluded with the opening of the exhibition La donna del mare by artist Annamaria Ducaton, curated by smaTs.

The presentation by the Generali Historical Archive illustrated the cataloging system used to describe the Group’s heritage assets—including historical archives, artworks, archaeological finds, and libraries—integrated with a digital library for reproductions. This ecosystem is complemented by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and, most recently, AI-based HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) for reading and indexing printed and handwritten texts.

In summary: for conservation and access, each type of asset is described according to reference templates aligned with internationally recognized standards as recommended by the scientific community and the Ministry of Culture, which may include reproductions. The Generali digital library adopts the IIIF standard, which promotes open access to images. The International Image Interoperability Framework is also a global consortium and community, including major libraries worldwide, offering a simple environment for high-quality image use and reuse.

Generali’s heritage figures reflect two decades of cataloging and digitization, resulting in a unified platform for managing cultural assets across Italy: 154,911 document records; 33,429 book records; 535,000 digital reproductions; over 55 million searchable words. Currently, 15% of the collections have already been digitized.

Part of this heritage is available online: the Generali cultural heritage website integrates catalog databases, providing unified access to selected records of documents, books, artworks, archival inventories, and digital library reproductions (305,349 records with digital attachments are searchable online).

Users can browse databases and the digital library seamlessly across inventories, archival and editorial materials within a single interface, thanks to multi-archive search across the site’s four sections (editorial, archives, libraries, and artworks).

OCR-based search using the open-source Tesseract system will be available on the website in 2026.

As for AI-powered HTR, integration with the Transkribus platform is a major focus of the ongoing work. Key handwritten sources—such as board meeting minutes—have been selected for both the Generali Historical Archive and the INA Historical Archive (Istituto nazionale delle assicurazioni), now part of the Generali Group. The next step will involve applying transcription models or training new ones.

The full video of the conference is available here.