IT and Culture: Half of Russia’s museum holdings go digital by 2020

The Ministry of Culture of Russia has launched mass digitization of Russia’s museum holdings in order to mount an electronic catalogue, announced the Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev in his speech at the “Government Hour” at the Federation Council on March 2 2011.

“The museum fund numbers more than 73 million items, and by 2020 we are planning to include into the electronic catalogue more than a half of this number – 40 million items”, the Minister told.

He mentioned that the work was in progress, last year saw digitization of 1,5 million exhibits, while plans for 2011 cover 5 million digitized items. There has never been such an integrated catalogue which was able to bring together all the museums.

Though similar databases were created before, each museum used to build them following its own standards. As for today, the Minister stressed that they had adopted a common standard for photographing and digitization of exhibits.

In future this catalogue’s database will enable to launch virtual tours.