Archives: The cultural heritage Cinderella. Value, performance, management

This essay addresses the topic of the economic value of archives and, in particular, of digital archives. In fact, while archival assets are currently worth 86.58% of the total mobile cultural heritage, the value of digital archives has never been calculated and, therefore, there is a lack of statistics. Similarly, there is a lack of regulation regarding the use of the information contained within archival documents, whether paper or digital, as the current legislation is forcibly flattened on the concept of image reproduction, which, on the contrary, is better suited to historical-artistic and archaeological assets. Yet, within the broader context of cultural heritage, the usefulness of this data for any kind of researches raises the problem of the autonomy of the archival sector. Mainly in regard to the identification of the legal and economic discipline for researching and using the data contained in the over 15 millions paper documents and in the millions of digital objects progressively obtained from them. This essay analyses the Data Act (EU Data Regulation 2017/ 2394), which acknowledges «reasonable compensation» for satisfying «a request to make data available», and the EU Directive 2019/1024, which addresses the openness of data and the reuse of public sector information, ruling out data contained in «libraries, including university libraries, museums and archives» from free usability.