BIA represents the culmination of over twenty years of research and development in historical scholarship and digital humanities. BIA is more than a search tool, but a digital portal to an otherwise lost world of early modern Europe from the perspective of Grand Ducal Tuscany. BIA allows for advanced searches into the epistolary collection of the Grand Ducal Medici family. Users are able to find entire volumes or individual documents by search through place, person, and category tags, archival collocation, date of creation, and keywords (from their Italian transcription and/or English synopsis), and then annotate and discuss documents in dedicated forums.