Strength points of the Italian Liners Historical Society are certainly its archive and its library. The following documents belong to the category “ephemera”:

Books and magazines, promotional brochures and folders, deck plans, menu, daily programmes and log books, passage tickets, baggage tags, passenger lists, posters, newspapers published on board, contracts and insurance papers, navigation charts, photographs.

 

The aim of the Society is to complete the filing and digitising of its ephemera archive, which todate is made of over 50,000 items of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to make it accessible and usable to the public through the Society’s virtual museum online. In this way we could offer a national archive of the Italian merchant marine and shipbuilding which so far didn’t exist.

 

After an adequate time devoted to research and development, protocols for filing each item were prepared. Filing systems of international museums, libraries and archives have been analysed and used as a minimum standard for archiving our ephemeras.

This cataloguing remains one of the most welcome instruments for researchers and maritime historians.