Emanuela Montagnari Kokelj / Pier Luigi Nimis / Francesco Peroni / Francesco Princivalle / Simonetta Pasqualis / Stefano Martellos
(University of Trieste, Italy)
The University of Trieste is a relatively young institution, created in 1924 from a previous High School of Commerce (1877) and including a Hospital of long tradition (1841). These origins, a policy of acquisitions of contemporary as well as old literature, furniture and paintings, and the development of research projects and relative equipment of high specialistic relevance in various fields have created a significant historical and scientific heritage.
The Sistema Museale dell’Ateneo di Trieste – smaTs is a system under construction that includes all these collections. Its core is represented by the Museum of Mineralogy and Petrography, the Museum of Biology, with the Botanic Garden and the most important greenhouse of coffee plants in Europe, and the Antique Library Funds of the Faculty of Law, which belong to the National Network of the Italian Universities’ Museums, and are known on a world-wide scale. At present the other components of the Sistema Museale are less structured for public use, though they start to be visible in the Internet (see www.units.it/smats). The accessibility on-line of the collections is one of the main goals of this operation, for both theoretical and practical reasons. The former pivot on the necessity of using the most updated systems of communication to present scientific and historical contents. As to the latter, the collections, quite different in typology, are hosted by ca. 25 Departments located in 4 different campuses; in certain cases – when the collections are constituted by technological objects of big dimensions, or the buildings themselves represent items of cultural heritage – they cannot be moved, either temporarily of permanently, or are not visible at all.
The philosophy of construction of the smaTs and the state of realization of the project are presented in an international congress for the first time.