A resource for research and teaching. The Online Portal of the Historical Dictionary of Italian Cartographers

The COFIN national project, Studies and researches for a historical dictionary of Italian cartographers, brought together, at the start of the 2000s, fourteen research units and a large group of scholars to prepare bio-bibliographical dossiers on the figures of those Italians (or non-Italians who had worked for many years in Italy) who had produced cartography. The mass of material then collected and sent to the organizers remained largely unpublished or published in different places, without a clear link for the general public. Recently a group of researchers at Rome Tre University have taken this material in hand and instigated its incorporation onto a portal, thus creating an open source, digital depository, organized in Italian and English, and accessible for consultation of its bio-bibliographical entries. The plan behind the portal, Digital DISCI, is the stimulation of research on Italian cartography and the cartographers of our country, but is envisaged as widening the research field to Europe and the rest of the world. The realization of several of the identified objectives depends upon making the project known to the scholarly and educational world. The work of university teachers and students can be a valuable means of spreading information locally and of increasing awareness.