Regions of Russia: Tatarstan launches a large-scale archival digitization

In 2010 Tatarstan is starting a large-scale project digitization of the most valuable documents, which are housed in the Republic’s archives, informed Danil Ibragimov, Director-General of the Archival Department under the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Tatarstan at the enlarged meeting of the department’s board. Among the participants of the session was the Prime Minister of the Republic of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov.

“We are going to start a large-scale digitization project of the most valuable documents. Moreover we will work under the database, compatible with the previously created scientific apparatus. We are targeting at the integrated system of State archives”, - emphasized Danil Ibragimov.

According to the speaker, the previous year within the framework of the pilot project implementation the Republic started a large-scale work on digitization of especially valuable documents of the National Archives of the Republic of Tatarstan. A number of documents of the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan have been scanned. “Still this is a slowly-moving process, and the main reason for this is a shortage of staff and equipment, and in particular, high-speed scanners”, - complained Danil Ibragimov.

The Archival Department Director-General stressed that the process of converting documents into the electronic format comes as one of the first-priority directions of department’s work. “In the National Archives of the Republic the conversion of documents into electronic format is planned, thus the electronic fund is being created”, - he remarked.

Danil Ibragimov remarked that the state and municipal archives of the republic have been actively implementing IT. “The National archives register archival documents mainly in the automatized regime. This allows to fulfill the function of the archival fund documents registration in an elaborate way. Presently the forth version of the software complex “Archival fund” is being implemented. Our goal is to complete this version implementation by 2010”, - added the Director-General.

Danil Ibragimov stated that in 2009 the Central National Archives of audio-visual documents of the Republic of Tatarstan obtained 31 thousand of storage units on tapes provided by the repository of the “New century” TV channel. The documents, which have a cultural and historical value, have been digitized and annotated. Archives are being enlarged with movie documents as well. The National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan has provided 150 storage units of unique Tatarstan newsreels in 30’s of XX century, which were under a threat of spontaneous ignition. They have been digitized too.

Nikolai Nikiforov, Director-General of the Information Technologies Center of Tatarstan spoke about the implementation of the electronic document circulation project. He claimed that in 2008 the system of the documents circulation of the Republic housed 690 000 of e-documents, and already in 2009 this figure reached 1,3 mil of documents. As to the number of joining organizations, he announced that in the end of 2008 there were 251 organizations, and in 2009 this number totaled to 927. “When we look at the share of e-documents, created, signed and submitted from one organization to another, we will see that there are currently around 80 thousand of them. Thus, the share of e-documents in the whole system equals 8-9 percent”, - remarked N. Niiforov.