The set up of the Historical Photographic Archive of the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità, ISS), is part of a wider project which aims at preserving and promoting the historical heritage of ISS, its publications of historical interest, the collections of scientific instruments and of objects of artistic value, and the ISS Museum. The project is carried out by the ISS Scientific Communication Service in close collaboration with all the other structures of the Institute. Its early steps date back to the late 1980s when a first photographic volume, edited by the ISS Editorial Activities Sector, was published.

 In 2015, the project for digitalization and cataloguing of historical photographs was resumed as an on-going activity within a series of ISS heritage preservation initiatives (events, multimedia production and different publications). The project consisted in identifying the whole corpus of images in order to set up a digital archive covering the history of public health. The archive was intended to illustrate the activity carried out by ISS, the main research body in the field of biomedical research in Italy, formerly named Istituto di Sanità Pubblica (1934) and then Istituto Superiore di Sanità (1941). 

Consistency and contents

The collection of historical photographs consists of 27.473 original black and white, paper based images, associated to descriptive metadata and classified into 150 subject and sub thematic areas relating to all aspects of public health (from parasitology to electronic microscopy, from maternal and child health to epidemiology, chemistry, physics and biology).

Chronology
Timespan dates between the second and the sixth decades of 20th century.