La Scala DAM

The projcet
With the Archive site, La Scala has given enthusiasts and academics easy access to the theatre’s history and artistic heritage.
Users are just a click away from masses of information on operas, ballets, and concerts performed at La Scala since 1950: chronologies, casts, posters, librettos, story lines, discographies, introductions to operas, and 50,000 photographs of performances and artists.
The website provides a relatively simplified showcase taken from its vast DAM Archive, which is a daily working tool for the theatre’s departments.
To preserve and celebrate its past, the Theatre has created an integrated system of asset management. The La Scala DAM (Digital Asset Management) is the digital archive of all available material from the second decade of the twentieth century to the present day, in different archives, stores and vaults.

It includes at least 24,000 sketches and fashion plates by great artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Mario Sironi, and many others, along with sketches, drawings and models created for the construction of sets and costumes, but that are themselves works of art; 45,000 costumes by great costume designers, supplemented by 60,000 accessories including jewellery, lingerie, shoe repairs, wigs and hats; and 80,000 props. The activity of the theatre is documented in 17,000 posters and detailed chronologies, and in over a million photographs of sets, rehearsals and back-stage.
The digital conversion work began in 1996 with the Sound Archive Rescue Project, which was then able to recover about 5000 tape recordings of La Scala opera, ballet and symphonic concerts since 1950.
Since 1998, the digitisation project has been extended in a modular fashion to provide the theatre’s archives - especially the costumes and accessories store, the sketch and fashion plate archive, the props store, the photo and poster archive - with a custom computer application and all the tools necessary for the storage of the different materials.

In 2006, La Scala DAM was linked with an intranet to the theatre’s key workstations, by providing documentation of the internal structures of the multimedia material for the creation, production and documentation of each show: the sketches and fashion plates, costumes, shoes, jewellery, hairstyles, props, programmes and posters, photographs and audio recordings. Everything is oriented towards the day-to-day activities of each area.
With ArchivioLaScala, a web showcase the DAM Digital Archive, a limited and simplified version of the huge content of the whole archive, academics and enthusiasts can now access an important part of La Scala’s artistic heritage at www.archiviolascala.org.
Engitel developed the platform with Oracle technology, as technology partner of the La Scala Theatre Foundation. Indeed, the project consisted in the porting of multimedia content from the previous platform to the current one.

Click here to download the case history.