Speech at the international conference Archives, Access and AI: Working with Born-Digital and Digitised Archival Collections con l’intervento dal titolo Socializing the Archive, London, Loughborough University, 15-17 Jan. 2020. Abstract: How can we give greater access to archives currently closed to the public? What are the best ways to involve donors of archives, and work with them in an active and collaborative way? These are some of the key questions that archivists, researchers and curators at CSAC have been asking during the last years. CSAC is a research centre of the University of Parma, which started its activities in 1968. Right from the start, it concentrated on assembling a collection of fine art, photography, architectural drawings, design, fashion and graphics, just by donation, as well as organizing exhibitions and publishing catalogues. Soon it started collecting and preserving not just artworks but entire archives of Italian artists, photographers, architects, product, graphic and fashion designer. Since 2007, it has been based at the Valserena Abbey, a medieval building just a few kilometres from Parma, and It is divided into five sections – Fine Art, Photography, Media, Project, and Visual Arts – containing around 12 million single items. This institution, which can be considered unique in the Italian panorama, has always operated as an archive and has never had a cluster of digital platforms, until 2015. Since then a permanent exhibition space has been opened inside the abbey and the centre decided to open a website, social networks profiles and several other digital platforms, with the precise goal of animating the archive and documenting the activities and research. I worked as a fellow researcher, inside a digital humanities team, to develop strategies for these new communities, to make them central to the life of the research center, alongside the public of researchers and visitors that already knew CSAC, consulted its archives, worked on exhibitions and loans, read the books and visited itsshows. The goal was mainly listening to these very different group of people, giving them access to digital contents (and to new physical spaces), while keeping them updated with the huge amount of information contained inside the archives and that the archives generate every day. This proposal aims at discussing how to Socialize the Archive, presenting strategies and models developed for a specific case study to make its collections accessible, while revealing the overall complexity of the exhibition and archive activities.