  There is a widespread interest to digitize the precious information contained
in the astronomical plate archives, both for the preservation of their content
and for its fast distribution to all interested researchers in order to achieve
their better scientific exploitation. This paper presents the first results of
our large-scale project to digitize the archive of plates of the Italian
Astronomical Observatories and of the Specola Vaticana. Similar systems,
composed by commercial flat-bed retro-illuminated scanners plus dedicated
personal computers and acquisition and analysis software, have been installed
in all participating Institutes. Ad-hoc codes have been developed to acquire
the data, to test the suitability of the machines to our scientific needs, and
to reduce the digital data in order to extract the astrometric, photometric and
spectroscopic content. Two more elements complete the overall project: the
provision of high quality BVRI CCD sequences in selected fields with the Campo
Imperatore telescopes, and the distribution of the digitized information to all
interested researchers via the Web. The methods we have derived in the course
of this project have been already applied successfully to plates taken by other
Observatories, for instance at Byurakan and at Hamburg.
