Il recupero e la valorizzazione dell’archivio Mediaset. Il progetto Arca

The article aims at presenting some of the most relevant aspects of Arca, the ambitious digitization project recently undertaken by Mediaset, the biggest Italian private broadcaster, covering all the 40 years of its history. The initiative requested the synergic effort of many different areas of the company, in order to map all the archived contents, find some criteria for their selection and prioritize their migration into digital format, enrich them with metadata, and make use of the digitized materials taking advantage of them in both linear and non-linear contexts. The main phases of the whole process are discussed on the basis of several interviews and many internal documents that the author was able to study. Moreover, the article also reflects on the deep reasons and logics behind such a challenging project, and on where Mediaset should have found its real value.