Lilith : Italian Women's Network Archives group
Lilarca : the new data base for women's archives

The project of the team-work on Lilith Net Archives is to build a net of
female archives collecting  and describing the "herstorical" memory of
women in Italy.
Many Centers connected with Lilith Net and many associations, public and
private archives keep female documentary fonds or fonds concerning women.
Often these fonds are not arranged and inventored, so they are not accessible.
Even in public archives documents on women have no specific point of
access and it is very hard to find them for anyone who is interested on
the "herstory".

The first stage of this work produced a book:
"Reti della memoria. Censimento di fonti per la storia delle donne in Italia"
(Memory nets. A census of sources for women history in Italy).
In this book 80 women archives all over the national territory are pointed
out, with some essays of  historians and archivists describing the problem
of finding and conservation of these documents.
We got into the study of any methodology in order to register in the
archives, comparing the Italian tradition with other traditions, especially
the anglo-american one.
Our work abides by ISAD(G), (General International Standard Archival
Description), rules wich are provided by the International Commission of
Archives, for sharing and homologation of archival descriptions.

We produced a software, called LILARCA, based on these standards, suitable
to description of present-day archives. LILARCA has being tried, at the moment,
by 7 teams-work.
It is an application of CDS/ISIS, information retrieval software given out
by Unesco already used by Lilith Net for bibliographical data base LILITH.
LILARCA allows computerized description of the archives fonds, hierarchically
organized on 7 levels, from fond to series (or sub-series) to files to items,
authomatically linked together by a codes system.

Three worksheets for data entry allow an appropriate description for each
level, avoiding redoundance and allowing access to fonds and sub-units
through a variety of points.

The computerized  description places on three areas:
- identification of area of units description: fields allowing access for
creator (provenance), for denomination or title, for dates of accumulation,
for location  of archives ecc.
- context area: historical note, biographical note, access, ecc.
- semantic content area: abstract, keywords or access points
(from Thesaurus Linguaggiodonna produced by Lilith Net), terms index,
geographical and cronological index, corporated bodys index ecc.
Semantic description are used for series, files and items only.
Next implementation of ISIS (Winisis) will permit a better navigability
through fonds with the possibility to create links between archival
descriptions (records) and files of scannerized texts, or files of pictures
(photographs, films, graphs...).
The aim is to build a collective computerized catalogue of archival fonds
that allows the search on-line, by the Web site of Lilith Net, accessible
on CdRom as well.

A net of women archives, sharing systems of description and computer
resources, will give value to the historical memory of women and will make
easier the study and the search of such important sources for the
present-day gender history, still not well know.

The Archives Work Group of the Lilith Network was formed in 1994 by a group
of women with different skills and interests belonging to the various centres
 which make up the network. For the most part its work is done via e-mail
with periodic meetings "in the flesh" to check progress and exchange views.

The group consists of the following members:
- Oriana Cartaregia, a librarian and archivist, who works in the conservation
  department of the University Library in Genoa;
- Graziella Casarin, a graduate in Logic, who developed the software used;
- Piera Codognotto, a librarian in Florence and one of the founding members
  of Lilith, who is an expert in indexing and thesaurus work;
- Paola D'Arcangelo, who recently graduated in Contemporary History from
  the University of Genoa with a dissertation on women's archives, who
  provided valuable help on contenporary archives and archive techniques;
- Paola de Ferrari, Genoa, who was the original instigator
  of the group and coordinated both the theoretical and the practical work
  involved.

The structure of the Web pages which illustrate the  LILARCA project was created
by: Francesca Cieloscuro, Marinella De Luigi, Francesca Martino, Rossella
Mignone, Paola Tigrino and Franca Topino as a project for an ENFAP National
Training Course (Tutoring for distance learning and multimedia communication),
which was held in Genoa during 1997 and 1998.
Paola De Ferrari and Francesca Martino revised and completed the Site.