Instituto Luce Cinecittà is the most important cinema related public company in Italy, born from the merging of Cinecittà Holding with Istituto Luce, an institution established back in 1924 with the primary goal of using cinema to spread culture and knowledge. Cinecittà Luce holds today one of the most important European film and photographic historical archives (www.archivioluce.com), in which are collected and digitally catalogued more than 12.000 newsreels, 9.000 documentaries, 3.000.000 photos, and several other titles, ranging from films, dating back to the origins of cinema, to collections and film clips of 20th century events. This is one of the largest audiovisual footage collections in Europe concerning the history of the twentieth century, and it has also been nominated by UNESCO-Italy for the membership registration in the “Memory of the World” registry.
Luce’s Archive, with a total of more than 4.000 hours of footage and 3 millions photos, has been fully digitized and it is accessible on-line since 1998. Cinecittà Luce has participated in several EU co-funded projects in the IST, eContentplus and ICT-PSP calls, aiming at developing best practices related to digitization and access in the audiovisual domain. Among them, European Chronicles Online (ECHO), Video Active, European Film Gateway, EUscreen and EFG1914.