Culture e impresa n. 1

Interview with Giancarlo Gonizzi (G.G.) – Person-in-charge of Barilla Historical Archives – 26th February 2001 (updated 15th September 2004)
by Maria Chiara Corazza (M.C.C.)

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Reconstructing an archives
The archives today
Classifying a wide variety of records
The archives collects, preserves and communicates
Business culture organizations

M.C.C.: What do you think of business archives or, more precisely, of historical business archives?

G.G.: I’ll tell you what I think, rather than the company opinion on this matter. It is important to say so. Barilla is a lucky company: it operates in the field of basic consumer products that are already widely recognized by the public. So it has more opportunities than other companies to utilize its archives for a number of initiatives: publications, events and so on.. The archives of a contract-supplier engineering company, for instance, may not be so well known to the public and therefore, has fewer opportunities than a company like Barilla, which is also a market leader. The typology of a company is a key issue as far as the potential for the historical archives is concerned.

I’d also like to stress that, in Italy, the concept of entreprenurial culture and history are not only lacking, but practically inexistent. I’m not speaking of culture in terms of economics (and I fully respect those who deal with these subjects, some with great authority), but of a culture of work. By working, human beings change their world, making it better or worse. If you ignore work in the sense of a reality-transforming activity , you are practically ignoring the memory of what humans do for most of their lives. When archaeologists dig a hole and discover buildings and walls, we can’t forget that those buildings and walls were built by people, whether architects, engineers, common labourers or contractors. So, valorizing the culture of work means enhancing the human being. Work is nothing in itself: without the person, there is no work. You see, in Italy, an ideological culture – regardless of party allegiance - has dominated for years, in the total absence of a culture of work to promote this primary human activity.

I believe that establishing a culture of work is the most important role of business culture organizations - museums, collections, exhibits and archives which, perhaps, should be re-defined. Society in general should recognize the value of these organizations too and provide companies that invest in this type of activity with fiscal incentives (such as tax breaks). But this is not my main point.

There is also another important matter I discussed recently with Prof. Paletta: archives and museums classification is currently managed by the Government. That is how it should be - State offices , by the very nature of their activity, produce papers which become archives, and the archival rules are set by the Government. In contrast, industry, in order to produce goods, also generates structures, procedures, machineries, and papers. All these elements are kept by what we call business archive/museum. I don’t mean to split hairs, it’s just a matter of space organization, you can call it neither archive nor museum. We call it something like «archimuseum», for lack of a better word. A business archives is different from other similar institutions.

I was kindly invited to the National Meeting of Italian Archivists, and I spoke about business archives and of how we work in them. Italian archivists themselves are realizing that their association was created to protect the interests of a category made up of 99% State employees. This situation is gradually changing as a new category of professional archivists is coming into being: they work within companies and focus on archiving matters (how do I order these records? How do I preserve them?), but they haven’t the proper cultural tools, not because of lack of training, but because of the lack of referential literature.

When considering how to process and preserve films, magnetic tapes or latest generation DVDs, a business archives must face brand new questions and situations that usually happen only in specialized film libraries, because we must keep audiotapes, LPs, original lacquer matrices, and all the recording mediums you can think of. Then we have printing materials, films and newspaper sheets: a lot of different kinds of mediums kept together in the same structure, with completely different preservation problems.

So, to sum up my answer to your question, we are facing a lot of problems starting from the basic philosophy underlying the culture of work and the definition of «preservation»( i.e. business archive is not like a public or State archive because it keeps what remains of the work process). On the other hand, there are exciting opportunities for studying innovative technical solutions for preservation. I think that people who manage or work in business archives have great potential, but hardly all the skills they need.

And finally, the business cultural organizations also face an even greater challenge; and that is to work collectively in increasing perception that enterprise in a broader sense is a full member of the community. In other words, if business cultural organizations can showcase cultural values on behalf of business as a whole, not only of a single entrepreneur, then these organizations will have justified their existence. If that doesn’t happen when times grow lean, such efforts are dismissed, because the main tasks of a company, its mission, is to produce goods or services, not culture. Nevertheless, business cultural institutions are precious means of motivating the employees and spreading a positive attitude towards work.