From 1651 to now. From paper to digital. Leonardo Da Vinci left us a huge cultural heritage we can now enjoy thanks to technology.
In occasion of 500 years since when Leonardo Da Vinci died, Adiacent signed the refactoring of e-Leo, the digital archive that contains the story of the technique and science.
Such an important occasion deserves a special project. 2019 has been dedicated to remember Leonardo: in occasion of 500 years since when Leonardo Da Vinci died, many initiatives have been organised to pay homage to the genius and remember his extraordinary discoveries.
The Municipality of Vinci decided to launch a public tender for the refactoring of the Leonardo Public Library e-Leo portal, which encloses and preserves the full collection of Leonardo’s works, with documents from 1651.
The origins of e-Leo go back to 2006-07, thanks to the municipality of Vinci and its collaboration with Italian and foreign istitutions as well. From 2007 the portal is available online for everybody with open access.
At the beginnings, it had basic features to consult Leonardo’s works. However, as a consequence of the evolution of web and its tools, the portal wasn’t correctly navigable on many devices anymore. So a new website became necessary and Adiacent took up the challenge realising a project where the management and the organisation of data have a key role.
How does e-Leo appear? Visitors will feel like in a library. Users can have access to a huge digital archive easily and quicky, thanks to a user friendly interface.
The graphic template has been recreated thinking of the modern and advanced interfaces we are now used to. A mobile versions available as well for those who prefer surfing the portal on their smartphones.
Thanks to this portal, people can flip through the documents like the would do in a library.
Yes, we couldn’t recreate the scent of paper but, thanks to technology, we provided the portal with important feautures.
On E-Leo users can read and interact with the documents, discovering the trascriptions of Leonardo’s works. They can also make a research through the text, insert bookmarks and query the archive thanks to an iconclass research.
E-Leo is based on a CMS WordPress, with some custom integrations realised with javascript/jQuery. This new consultation portal is now dynamic and it can be integrated with new feautures and new functionalities.
One of the most important limits of the previous website was the lack of an area to manage the documents that users could consult.
Thanks to the refactoring, now this area exists and it’s a proper portal created specially to let librarians upload scanned papers, images transciptions and they can also create a sort of map between the images and the corresponding literal transcriptions.
Using PHP Symfony framework and a set of javascript/jQuery/Fabric.js libraries, extended with custom scripts, our web developers created a management area on the portal that allows the upload of scanned documents, the management of information relevant for the consultation as the iconclass classification of documents, lemmas and glossaries attachments.
15 April 2019 the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella inaugurated the celebrations for the 500-years anniversary of the death of Leonardo, organised by the municipality of Vinci. The President visited Museo Leonardiano and Leonardo’s house in Anchiano and it was just there that we presented the first beta version of e-Leo, which got his appreciation. We’re really proud of that moment.