The Italian case

"Available" is not a correct word, as no present single researcher or private association has enough money and facilities to get and store a complete or really compehensive selection of international books, magazines, newsclippings, reports and whatever else published about the UFO argument. Even worse, the documentation managed by each single buff is so bulky that it is really difficult and costly to arrange an exchange of material with somebody else. Information transfer by using traditional media such as printed paper has become a problem since a lot of time: the situation will become more and more difficult in the near future, producing a huge bottleneck in the development of new well-documented research works.

A commonplace example: let's think to an American researcher having a catalogue of close encounter cases and willing to supply it to an European colleague under the form of a collection of text documents and images. First of all, a lot of time and money are necessary to copy all that stuff in a not too good quality, then more time and money is requested to prepare a parcel and mail it. The material will arrive at destination after some time, yet when it will be in the hands of the researcher there are other problems. The way to manage all that amount of information will be quite limited and always very time-consuming: actually, all operations aimed at extracting only some information on the ground of search requests or alternative use of the available documents will be limited by the paper nature of information. Such a situation is one of the causes of the low number of real well-documented research works carried out within the UFO movement.

CHAPTERS
• Information as Evidence
• Computers and UFO Research
• Ufology Goes On-Line
• The Italian Example
• ITACAT and TRACAT
• PHOTOCAT and the Question of Photographic Evidence
• Other Computer-Based Projects
• Multimedia Catalogues