Archive Proximity

[hatoncat]

Pavia is a 3 hour drive from me, so yeah not really nearby, but it’s only a 45 minutes drive from Milan (which I do visit often, at least twice a year). Do you have anything specific you’d like to search in Padua? Which archives are worth looking into in your opinion?

There could be something of interest in->

Archivi e fondi | Biblioteche di Padova You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Although, it doesn't immediately seem promising to me.

There could be something of interest in the Archivio storico diocesano di Padova. In the 15th century religious figures were political figures and they did write letters in cipher. (I  tracked down an enciphered letter in the Archivio Diocesano di Genova from 1421) However, I have no particular reason to suspect there might be enciphered letters in the church archives in Padova.

I believe the Comune Archives in Padua only has material from the 16th century onwards.

Of course, the University of Padua being a great historic university could have ciphers in Library/Archive. I haven't yet investigated the inventories of the university to see if I can see references to anything interesting.

I don't know of anywhere else in Padua to look, but there maybe an archive/library that I haven’t thought of. Of course, there could be private family archives with something of interest, but who knows about them?

Nearby towns like Vicenza or Ferrara could have early 15th ciphers in their archives.

I had an idea today, somewhat related to my previous metadata concept of using digitization to co-locate keywords or names, to create a universal identifier for each document in a rare document archive whenever a document gets checked out and scanned. The researcher can opt-in, along with the library, and choose to add a new digital tag to the document (or documents) before they are returned to the archive. The tag wouldn't be on the physical document itself, but in the library's computer system. This could allow it to link up to a worldwide index and database of documents that might not be related originally to the topic of the researcher's choosing, but can later be found using similar unique identifiers. So if I were looking for mentions of a person, and an individual in the 1400s travelled to one city in 1435, but the only record is in that town's archives, that new information can be added to the unique identifier (it can include things like page number, book title (if any), date written, city published or written in, author(s), and what cities the document had previously been in. While this would be quite an undertaking, it might simplify some research and also allow other topics to be discovered in parallel.

Edit: Things like URI exist You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but I had something like an ORCID for historical individuals in mind and for objects.

Edit 2: While it might sound a bit like Borge's Library of Babel, there are some database systems that are optimized for large systems You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is used by Facebook, although there are others: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. A GraphDB could also help identify relationships, but moreso on known networks (references might be inaccurate).