Information technology and culture: New digital project of the National Library of Russia “Publications of the Russian avant-garde”

The department of perspective electronic projects of the National Library of Russia (Saint-Petersburg) began working on a new project, whose goal is to digitize 1,000 of the most significant books from the collections of the Russian avant-garde of the National Library of Russia.

"Publications of Russian avant-garde" are books of 1910 - early 1930, representing new directions in various art forms. These are editions of the various areas of the avant-garde works from different currents futuristic literature and art, such as V. Mayakovski, K. Malevich, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenikh and others. They are experiments in the field of literature: language, imagery and in the field of book design. These publications included the participation of the famous artists and photographers: El Lissitzky, A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova, E. Guro, M. Matyushin, N. Akimov, B. Titov and many others.  

The collection of Russian avant-garde is unique not only in its content. Editions of the early 20th century are very fragile, some applications contain hard and shiny elements of scanned colors (for example, gold foil), and they have a different format and quality of paper (often within the same publication). Therefore in order to scan the scanner is used a unique Bookedge. Bookedge - the only scanner that allows you to scan one page of the book up to A2 inclusively, revealed them less than 120 degrees with an optical resolution of 600 dpi.

By the scanner is used a software to create, manage and support the life cycle of digital copies of documents Opus Workflow, developed by Digital Library Systems Group at Image Access, which is a supplier of high-tech software solutions for libraries since 1993.

As you work on a project digital copies of publications will be available in a Digital library of the NLR as a collection of publications of the Russian avant-garde.