From the Document’s Life Cycle to The Monument’s Life Cycle: the case of the De Murtas Barrack in Cagliari

The paper illustrates the first results of interdisciplinary research aimed at investigating the role of documentary sources in the process of conservation, protection, and sustainable use of military historical heritage. In particular, the study deals with the possibility of enhancing the quality of the Monument’s Life Cycle Management through an innovative Document’s Life Cycle Management; the meticulous analysis of the artefact, as well as the monitoring and documentation of the changes that have occurred over time, are meant to be the basis of this process. The research specifically focuses on the ‘military inventory’, a tool used to give a constantly updated image of the heritage. The inventory structure has remained almost unchanged over time: thanks to the possibility of carrying out a consequential reading of the updates, it represents today the key instrument for understanding defensive historical architectures, finding an interesting parallel in the Raumbuch - undoubtedly its direct descendant. The transposition of the inventory/Raumbuch into a digital device, based on HBIM technologies, can innovatively support the governance of the Monument’s Life Cycle, by designing an effectual archiving system for the obtained information, whose storage and traceability depend on an appropriate set of metadata. The case study is the De Murtas Barrack, an ancient Jesuit Novitiate converted in XIX century in a military hospital, site of great complexity in terms of historical stratification and documentary consistency. As part of the research, the historical inventories and an important iconographic fund related to the monument were identified and digitized, followed by the definition of a specific metadata set. The systematization of the data coming from these different types of documents, compared with those coming from the direct analysis of the building, has led to a detailed knowledge of the monument: the updating of this preparatory database for BIM modelling is the instrument for monitoring the transformations, and for developing future informed restoration projects.