Diapositiva di PowerPoint
At this point in the development of IT applications (multimedia products and the use of complex SW), historians were still not able, on their own, to use a home or university PC for research which demanded specific skills.
In a certain sense, technological developments put the lone historian in a crisis, because he/she had to find a way of changing personal working methods in order to keep pace with other professionals. The finances for acquiring sophisticated tools and the manpower necessary to operate them also had to be found. These things can only be achieved within large structures.
For this reason, at the end of the ë90s, historical research which used electronic processing was concentrated in several centres of excellence, set up by the main Italian Universities and by private research centres.