It is with this that the Archivio Biografico del Movimento Operaio (ABMO) (www.abmo.it) wishes to present its new website as another tool to make its work known. In the hope that this will prove of interest to you, we should particularly appreciate your assessment of the usefulness and/or usability of our online Archive, together with any suggestions for improving it. We have deliberately chosen not to dwell in this message on the reasons that led to the creation of this new Institute and its other activities, since you can read about them in the site itself. Moreover, what matters to us now is to present the very heart of our project.
Besides continuing its historical-prosopographic analysis of the various political currents of the workers' movement, AMBO's intention and immediate aim is to make the biographies so far realised immediately available on the Internet. The profiles appended to the Repertori Biografici (Biographical Repertoires) of the first four volumes in the series of Biografie individuali e collettive del movimento operaio italiano ("Individual and Collective Biographies of the Italian Workers' Movement"), published by Edizioni Panterei (www.edizionipanterei.com), Milan, starting from 2006, will therefore be available.
Consultation of the ABMO, in alphabetical order or by name, gives access to the biography of the person concerned, together with the sources. If you then click on the sections "photo gallery", "data repository", "literary archive" and "audio-visual archive", below the biography itself, the other available photos, a list of the archived manuscripts relative to the person in question (mostly copies of police records held by the Institute), some of them immediately available, a list of the first editions of his/her works, held by AMBO in the original, and accessible online in their integral version, together with a collection of audio-visual documents regarding him/her, will also be displayed. All this material is being digitised, but the part not yet available on the Internet as such can in any case be consulted at any moment by previous contact with the Institute. To have an idea of the final appearance of all the biographies, we suggest that, in the first instance, you take a look at the biography of Andrea Costa.