This issue examines several aspects related to business culture that need to be analyzed in the light of the social and economical situation of the last few years.
The crisis, although it has not stopped the determination to promote business culture, has surely led to a downsizing of its goals. The focus has been scaled back to preservation activities, sometimes minimal or basic, along with "slimmer" valorization events, especially in the private sector – within companies or their relative institutions (foundations, museums and so on). No doubt there are some exceptions to such a general analysis, considering also that "the shock wave" of general phenomena is felt later in the domain of culture, as a sort of aftershock. In the last two years, in addition to the reduction of in-house financial resources, there has also been a radical reassessment of the funding for cultural activities from both public and private institutions.
Despite the first signs of recovery, the most persistent key words are still those related to preservation, control of dispersion, centralization and others. And once again, the creation of networks as a vehicle for sharing skills and discussing problems as well as giving greater value to pertinent activities appears to be extremely important. Valuable projects such as the 20th-Century-Fashion Archives are clear proof of that; in terms of the relationship between private and public, it is interesting to read about the joint accomplishments of the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci (now a private entity – a foundation – but with a decidedly public "nature") with private companies. The current issue also delves into the themes of preservation, monitoring of potential dispersion and "educating to preserve" according to standard procedures thanks to the example given by the Reserve Bank of India, which reports on the general trend of the banks, also Italian ones, who, behave almost like public institutions in the matter of archives, focusing on the rules of production, preservation, selection and discarding.
To conclude there is a cross-section of the various typologies of cultural assets and their valorization, which leads us to oral sources – with a reflection on the unusual project of the website Memoro.org. The Borsalino Foundation, gives a remarkable account of its creation and its methods of valorizing the company's history in Alessandria.
If, during the first years of the 21st century, we were riding the waves of development with well- financed cultural projects springing up all over the country, in recent years we have experienced opposite conditions. In this current lean scenario, substantial support to the entrepreneurial world has come from the Chambers of Commerce and, generally speaking, from public institutions who, although lacking funds for allocation, sought to maintain relationships and build networks. Despite these constraints, these institutions have remained stable and have given oxygen to cultural initiatives that otherwise would have never been accomplished. At the same time, as experimental pilots, they kept investing in the development of innovative fields such as the push towards computerization and overcoming its related complexities, In our opinion, these topics will be extremely relevant in the near future and, in relation to methods of management and preservation, could raise important questions within the archival field and beyond.