Ancr’s task has been, right from the outset, to quest, to gather, to conserve, to restore, to diffuse:

• film material shot during the Resistance and relating to the partisan war, the fascist and nazi regimes, antifascism, the deportations both in Italy and in Europe in the course of World War II;
• video-recorded eye witness accounts of the years between the two wars, of the war, of the partisan struggle and of the post-war period;
• it also focuses on the new forms of communication and documentary expression through images with the utilisation of new technologies and supports.

In June 2003, ANCR moved from its historic headquarters at via Fabro 6 – where it was first set up – to its new offices at Palazzo dei Quartieri Militari in via del Carmine 13. The move to the new headquarters allows ANCR to not only continue its intensive traditional work but also to further pursue its experimentation in the area of new media. Following a careful consideration and in-depth investigation on the relationship between information technology and audiovisual archives, ANCR has initiated the digitalisation process of its audiovisual heritage. Digitisation, in fact, allows ANCR to achieve two key-targets:

• to conserve its audiovisual legacy
• to widen access of the material conserved by also allowing online consultation.

This process, nevertheless, also raises an issue that all archives have to confront: the management and control of access in order to ensure that the images are not unlawfully utilised. ANCR intends to open a debate on this issue.
Ancr’s aim is therefore to revitalise the old contents and to open new working frontiers (and fronts) to widen the knowledge through images of the world we live in, but always remaining faithful to the guidelines that have inspired it right from the outset – guidelines according to which new technologies are but instrumental and must be content-oriented.

“We are an archive; and we, therefore, conserve paper documents and materials in boxes, folders, dossiers, files and other containers. But we are also a cinematographic archive and, therefore, we also conserve films. And quite a few at that (1,700 to be precise, which arte not few), of various format; difficult to handle and conserve – objects that are bulky, heavy, that must be protected against light, heat, dust, humidity. But as “cinematographic” is our defining adjective, our task is also to conserve, at a wider level, all images having a historical interest – maybe we should begin by establishing which are the criteria for what is intended as “historical”! – whatever their support may be: film, paper or photographic plate, and, today, also other video-magnetic supports including videotapes and videocassettes, optical discs and digital cassettes. And then, of course, there are the sounds, conserved on spools, cassettes, perforated tapes, films, records. We thus have the film library, the video library, the photo library in addition to the library and the newspaper library. And we have shelves and shelves for cinema-related press-books, fliers and materials. But ANCR is not only the sum of all these halls.... ANCR started to collect films in 1969, in a primitive, instinctive, manner, but with the will to save the documentation of a world that – as all worlds – was disappearing. It was then that we charted the two crucial courses we are still pursuing: the interviews with eye-witnesses and the collection of films.”

(Paolo Gobetti)