IT and Museums: Arkhangelsk museums go digital

Five museums of Arkhangelsk region have received sets of equipment – server stations, computers, workstations, scanners, printers, cameras and other equipment necessary for e-record keeping and museum holdings digitization. These are Krasnoborsk, Kotlas, Velsk, Shenkursk and Solvychegodsk municipal museums. The equipment was delivered within the framework of the federal program implementation focused on creation of the e-database of the National catalogue, RF Museum Fund (Goskatalog), which is aimed at meeting the national objective of record keeping and studying of museum values, improvement of public access to museum storage units and collections.

So far, according to statistics, just 7% of the region’s museum fund is open for the public access. The museum e-catalogues cover information on just 20% of the joint museum fund of the region, while the share of digitized items makes up only about 1%.

The All-Russian database will encompass the key data concerning all museum exhibits and museum collections, which make the fund of the country. The database will be completed within several years, and with the exception of some confidential information (e.g. detailed information on the item’s owner, its cost), will be freely available on the Internet.

Participation in the federal program will enable Arkhangelsk oblast museums to activate the process of electronic recordkeeping of museum storage units and e-catalogues creation, introduce unified descriptions of items from the region’s richest museum holdings into the federal data bank. What is more, thanks to the project unique cultural and historical valuables of Primorye will go on Internet.