Five and a half thousand unique materials of the Russian Geographical Society have already been digitized by the Presidential Library

The five-year cooperation between the Presidential Library and the Russian Geographical Society, which marks its 172nd anniversary on August 18, brings impressive results. On the portal and in the electronic storage facility at the Senate, 3, 5540 of 11,000 cases passed by the RGO for digitization are already submitted. Among them rare and valuable archive materials, for example "Ethnographic information about the Podolsk province", dated 1869, they can be "flipped through" in the electronic reading room of the library; there you can see the Annual Reports of the RGO of the pre-revolutionary period. On the portal you can find "Trade relations between Lapps and Russian in the half of the XVII century" (1905), the document "The Austrians in the Pechora Territory" (1872) and other rare sources. 

The materials of the Research Archive and the Research Library of the RGO, digitized by the Presidential Library, include manuscripts of the proceedings of members of the RGO, reports, separate documents on the Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Vitebsk, Vladimir, Vologda and other provinces (altogether about 50) from the XVII to the early of the XX century, as well as books on travel and local magazines of local history. The digitized documents systematically enrich the library's collections and provide access to the maximum number of readers.

A number of historical materials and scientific reports are in demand today, as a basis for promoting certain strategic goals in solving economic and geopolitical problems of a national scale, such as the development of the Arctic and the Antarctic or the conservation of fisheries in the Caspian.

After the formation of the Arctic Institute in Leningrad (now the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute), it was decided to proceed with a detailed and planned survey of the water areas. Soon it was possible to organize a special scientific and trade detachment in the Novaya Zemlya expedition of the Arctic Institute in 1931. For the needs of the expedition, a sail-motor boat with a Bolinder engine of 20 horse power was ordered - Leningrad researchers quickly mastered it in voyages along the northern seas. "The wide gulf Krestovskaya Guba extends for 19 and a half miles to the western shore of the northern island of Novaya Zemlya", - says the publication “Proceedings of the Arctic Institute” (Vol. 7, 1931). - On the shores of its western half, there are quite tall terraces, covered with tundra or bare. The eastern half consists of more or less high mountains".  

In the Arctic, following the prospectors, economic facilities appeared. Fundamentally authors-specialists who appear on the pages of the monthly journal Uralsovet "Ural Economy" for 1925-1935 solved problems; you can read it in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library.

In the fifth issue of the journal D. Vengerov published a problem article "Forestry and metallurgy in the Urals region", where economic emphases were clearly laid out: "Among the Ural business leaders, the conviction holds that the forests of the Urals have no independent economic significance, that they are only reserve fund for the development of our mining industry. Such a narrow-departmental view is fundamentally untrue, as it is deliberately suppressed that, in addition to g the fuel requirements of the mining industry in the Ural region, at least the Kama basin, from time immemorial supplied remote forest markets of the treeless Volga and the Transcaspian region, and part of the forest even transported abroad: to Turkey, Persia and Italy. <...> Without completely denying the enormous state significance of the development of metallurgy for our country, one cannot at the same time ignore the interests of forestry and forest industries, which for the general economy of the country has, if not more, at least not less importance than metallurgy. Both now and in the near future, wooden Russia will need a huge amount of wood".  

From the published materials on the portal of the Presidential Library readers are particularly interested in old books about travel. Among them there are translated publications, for example, the "Malay Archipelago: the Land of Orangutan and the Bird of Paradise" (1872) by the English author Alfred Russel Wallace. "Returning to England in the spring of 1862, I found in my house a lot of packaged boxes with collections that I sent home from time to time with an order not to touch before my arrival. It turned out that out of three thousand bird skins, I had accumulated up to a thousand species, and at least seven thousand varieties of twenty thousand beetles and butterflies", - he wrote. 

"Looking at the map or globe of the eastern hemisphere, we will notice between Asia and Australia", - the author explains, - several large and small islands (the Malay Archipelago). Located on the equator, these islands are washed by the warm water of the tropical oceans and enjoy, thanks to this circumstance, one of the best climates on the globe: it is warm, moist, without abrupt transitions and promotes the development of many plants unknown anywhere else. Here is the birthplace of the richest fruits. Precious roots, a giant flower of coral reef, a large green-winged bird wind butterflies (queen butterflies), an anthropoid orangutan and a charming bird of paradise. The islands are inhabited by a particularly interesting Malay race, which live only on these islands, which is why they were called the Malay Archipelago".  

Polyanovsky described the "Tropical Voyage" (1936), made on the Soviet ship "Sergo Ordzhonikidze" along the route Turkey, Egypt, Ceylon, India, Philippine Islands, Korea: "We cross the Black Sea. On the first night, it met us with a storm, pretty patted. The next morning the sun rose, the weather was calm and quiet. We were approaching the shores of Turkey. At dawn, the Anatolian and Rumelian lighthouses were opened, the mist of the morning disappeared and the Bosporus crevice appeared".

Thanks to modern information technologies of the Presidential Library, unique materials become available to the maximum number of people, and the cultural and historical heritage of the country is preserved for future generations. To date, the Presidential Library has about 640,000 items.