Not so long ago, nearly everyone knew the experience: pull down a dusty family photo album, turn the pages slowly, and find yourself transported—watching birthday parties and vacations and ordinary afternoons come alive across decades. Often you'd look through it with someone older, who remembered the names and stories, or someone younger, who'd never seen any of it before. The photos begin to breathe again. In those moments, you understand something true about who you are and where you come from.
Here in our editorial office, we feel something like that whenever we return to the work of digitizing old issues of Ombre e Luci. For nearly four years now, we've been working on this ambitious project—an effort to bring online, for as many people as possible, all the articles we've published over the decades in print.
The decision came during a planning meeting about redesigning the website (ombreeluci.it). With a mix of naiveté and overconfidence, we told ourselves we'd finish by the magazine's fortieth anniversary—which happens to be right now. The first issue came out in 1983. But technical obstacles and other work got in the way. The birthday arrived, and the gift wasn't ready. What follows is an account of what we've managed so far, and some of what we've felt in the process of scanning through and rebuilding this album of ours.
First, what does digitizing actually mean?
Without getting too technical: digitization means converting information that exists in analog form—a printed text, a photograph, a vinyl record, a film—into numerical format. (Digital comes from the Latin digitus, the finger, our ancestors' first counting tool.) Still unclear? Try this: digitizing is like translating from human language into the language of computers. We communicate through our senses—with words, images, sounds. Computers, at least for now, speak only in electrical signals expressed as numbers, usually long strings of 0s and 1s. But how do you actually do it?
There are different ways to digitize a magazine, each with trade-offs depending on your equipment and budget. We've had to make do with what we have in our small office. Here's what we've done, step by step, to turn a paper issue of Ombre e Luci into a digital file:
- Scanning: We have an older scanner—the kind where you lift the lid, insert the page, close it, and press start. Article by article, page by page, in a repetitive and laborious process, we create high-resolution digital photographs of every page.
- Creating a PDF: Fancier scanners do this automatically, but we're not so equipped. Once we have all the individual scans, we combine them into a single PDF file. Then we rename it and tag it with all the metadata we need for proper archiving: title, issue number, publication date, copyright info, and so on.
- Uploading to the Internet Archive (see box below). We needed to do this for two reasons. First, this platform guarantees high standards of security and preservation over time. Second, it let us work around another limitation of our aging scanner: the lack of OCR capability.
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that converts a photograph of printed text into digital format, so the text can be edited, copied, and pasted into any writing program. This lets us extract all the article text without having to retype it by hand.
- Checking and correcting: This process is far from perfect, so we have to go through every article word by word, line by line, fixing OCR errors and formatting the text properly.
- Once the text is done, we move to the photographs. The many beautiful images in our magazine have to be cropped and edited to improve lighting, color, and scanning quality. Then we optimize them for the web, reducing file size without losing quality.
- So far so good—but the most important step is still ahead. Once all the ingredients are ready, we can publish online. We recreate the article on the website: the title, the cover image, accompanying photos, paragraphs. But it would be a mistake to stop there. The real power of the internet is its hypertext structure, and that's where the fascinating work begins. An article from issue 2 of 1983 can be linked—by subject, content type, keyword, author, date—to many other articles published since, creating connections impossible on paper. It's long work, endlessly creative, potentially endless. We do it slowly but steadily. The result has been thematic collections: one on autism, another on catechesis, another on disability in film, gathering all the material we've published over the years on each topic.
That's the bare mechanics of digitization—and believe us, it's as tedious to read about as it is to do. What's kept us going is our belief in the value of what Ombre e Luci publishes, the urgency of preserving it (many paper copies are deteriorating), and our desire to share this inheritance with as many people as we can. A work of stitching things back together. Never easy. Always full of surprises. How many times have we paused in the office, or messaged over WhatsApp, trying to piece together the context of an article, or track down a name to match a face in a photo—or found ourselves moved, sitting at Photoshop, looking at the smile of a friend who's gone now, someone who walked a stretch of the road with us.
…like a family album
That shared road. There's a beautiful passage from Paolini's play about the Vajont disaster that comes back to us often as we scan and correct and publish. A character is hiking toward a mountain refuge: "Walk and shut up! The shelter is over there... it's been over there for three hours... and how can it still be there if you've been walking for three hours? Who the hell moves shelters around in the mountains? But they do move them... maybe they move them for your own good, but they move them. And while you're out there struggling down the trail [...] asking yourself who made you do this, you look back... and that's when you understand why it was worth all the effort in the world to get there."
Looking back, retracing the path we've walked, makes us aware that the road was laid by others before us. We feel them near. Such affection for all these fellow travelers—the young people, the parents, the friends who are the protagonists and authors of this adventure. And such admiration for the "old" editorial team and all the collaborators who over the years built this "little magazine" (that's what they called it), trying each issue to tell the many shadows but also, and above all, the many lights that accompany this journey.
And how much has changed in these forty years. We noticed it in small details that forced us to stop and ask hard questions. The words themselves, for instance, in the articles from the early issues. How many times, while publishing, did we pause in embarrassment, wondering whether we should really transcribe "handicapped" or "mongoloid," respecting our commitment to preserve the text as it originally appeared? Or whether to publish an interview with an expert from the early 1990s praising therapies that science later rendered obsolete—or worse, harmful. After long and challenging discussions, we decided to reproduce what was written in the original, but always making the publication date crystal clear, and in the most extreme cases, adding an editor's note explaining the limitations of the content. These words and approaches, seen in perspective, mark turning points toward a new sensitivity.
And what about the "Jean Vanier case"? An earthquake that shook the L'Arche and Faith and Light communities to their core. It forced us to make an editorial decision that wasn't easy: what do we do with his many articles published on our site? Are they still valid? Do they still make sense in light of what emerged after his death? How will people read them now? Should they be deleted? These questions are necessary and painful, and perhaps there is no final answer. We debated in the office. We disagreed. We worked through it. Finally we compromised: we left Jean's articles online, but—as with the earlier difficult cases—we added a notice directing readers to the findings of the international investigation.
Less complex but equally rewarding is to rediscover articles about the many volunteer initiatives, family homes, welcome centers—often started by parents and friends with few resources and lots of goodwill. Each time we search online for the name of one of these organizations, and pray we'll find it still thriving, even stronger than before. What satisfaction when we do, and we can update their contact information, add a website, maybe even reach out and write a new piece about what they're doing now. What sadness when the search turns up nothing, or an abandoned website, its last update years ago.
There are also the many articles that, with careful restraint, document developments in policy, laws, decrees on disability, on life after parents die, on volunteering and the third sector. These articles too, seen over time, tell a story, trace a path that deserves investigation and reflection.
None of this work would have been possible without help from many people who've contributed to assembling this vast mosaic that is Ombre e Luci's history. We'll mention one name as an example and as a thank you: Stefano Guarino, one of the historical memories of Faith and Light, who carefully kept (nearly) all the issues of "Insieme," the mimeographed bulletin published from 1975 to 1980, the predecessor to Ombre e Luci. You can find its first issues on our site.
So: happy birthday, Ombre e Luci. We're still hiking toward the shelter. ("Walk and shut up!") And to all of you: when you have a moment, please come flip through this beautiful family album with us.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive (archive.org) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and making accessible digital content of all kinds: websites, books, videos, music, software. Using techniques like web archiving, it captures and preserves copies of websites so they remain accessible in the future. Internet Archive matters because it preserves the historical and cultural memory of the internet, keeping alive material that might otherwise be lost forever.
The benefits it offers are significant. It provides long-term preservation of uploaded content, with the guarantee that materials remain accessible in the future. It ensures global access—anyone, anywhere in the world, can search and use the archived materials. Internet Archive also offers collaboration tools that allow institutions and individuals to share content and create new resources together. Worth noting too is the possibility of reuse and adaptation—through appropriate licensing (like Creative Commons), uploaded content can be used and repurposed in various ways. Finally, it enables research and analysis through advanced search tools that help users discover and examine the materials stored there.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a system of licenses that allows creators to share their work while specifying how others may use it. There are several Creative Commons licenses, each with different rules. Some allow only personal use; others permit commercial use or modification. Creative Commons gives creators control over how their work is used while still allowing others to use the material for specific purposes.
There are six types of Creative Commons licenses:
- Attribution (CC BY): Anyone can use, modify, and distribute the material, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the original author.
- Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA): Like the above, but any modifications must be shared under the same license.
- Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND): Allows use and distribution of the original material, but not modification.
- Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): Allows use, modification, and distribution only for non-commercial purposes.
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): Like the above, but any modifications must be shared under the same license.
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND): Allows only non-commercial use of the original material, with no modification permitted.
In general, the more restrictive the license, the less freedom there is in using the material.