Marking 10th anniversary of the cooperation between the Presidential Library and Russian archives

March 25–26, 2019 Scientific and Practical Conference “Russian Archives and the Presidential Library: 10 Years of Cooperation” was held in St. Petersburg on Senate Square, 3.

“This event is one of the first in a series of events dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Presidential Library”, - noted Director General of the institution Ilya Bykovnikov. “We decided to start with the archives, because the library itself once began with archival materials”.

The Director for Information Resources of the Presidential Library Elena Zhabko focused on the history and strategy of forming electronic collections. “When opening, the Presidential Library received over 20 thousand units of storage, mainly from the Russian State Historical Archive and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (General Assembly of the Russian Federation)”, - she recalled. For 10 years, a lot of work has been done. So far more than 770 thousand units of storage are already placed in the Presidential Library’s collections.  

“As a priority for the digitization of our collections (and the transfer of relevant materials to the Presidential Library), documents on the most topical issues of national importance were considered. Thus, in 2011, in connection with the 150th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom, we launched digitizing 577 fonds of the Main Redemption Institution of the Ministry of Finance”, - said Sergey Chernyavsky, Director of the Russian State Historical Archive. Then there were collections for the APEC Forum, the 200th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Peter Stolypin, etc. In total, the Presidential Library received more than 300,000 cases from the Russian State Historical Archive.  

Sergei Mironenko, research advisor of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, noted that the Presidential Library’s collections have received a lot of materials from the General Assembly of the Russian Federation, including those devoted to the two revolutions of 1917 and individual government and public figures of the time: A. F. Kerensky, M. V. Rodzyanko A. F. Koni, A. I. Denikin, A. V. Kolchak and others.

Mironenko also spoke about a joint project that would be implemented in the near future: "These are hundreds of books and periodicals that were published outside our homeland... they were published in different parts of the world: South and North America, Europe and Southeast Asia".

Oksana Morozan, Director of the Central State Archive for the Cinema and Photo Documents of St. Petersburg, shared her personal feelings about many years of interaction with the Presidential Library: “We have been cooperating with the Presidential Library for a very long time. Your exhibition hall is located in the former storage area, where I once worked in the Russian State Historical Archive” (before moving to the new building, the Russian State Historical Archive was located on the Senate Square, 1-3).

In the course of the conference a cooperation agreement between the Presidential Library and the United State Archive of Chelyabinsk Region have been signed. At the same time Ilya Bykovnikov noted that the Presidential Library intended to further expand its presence in the regions of Russia.

Reports of the Presidential Library’s specialists were devoted to the formation of thematic digital document collections, work with documents from private collections, the difficult task of integrating library and archive documents in a single digital repository with a single search engine, and plans to enrich the electronic collections of the Presidential Library with archival materials in the near future .

If talking about the enrichment of the Presidential Library’s collections from private collections, one cannot but mention a large-scale campaign to collect evidence of the siege, organized jointly with the newspaper Petersburg Diary and Radio Rossiya - St. Petersburg. About 250 people responded to the corresponding call, who brought more than 2500 documents for digitization. The list included photographs of the war years, letters, diaries of survivors of the siege and others.

One of the reports of the Presidential Library’s specialists “illustrated” a portrait of a typical user of archival materials. It was noted that among such users there were professional researchers, but they were a minority. It is mainly about amateur researchers, students and schoolchildren, library specialists. The user’s audience of the Presidential Library is constantly increasing, as well as the regional network of the institution.

On the eve of the conference, a workshop on the scanning archival documents was held at the Presidential Library, which was attended by a dozen interested organizations, including GlavNIVTS, ELAR Corporation and others.

In the coming years, the Presidential Library’s electronic collections will continue to be enriched in three ways: digitizing on a competitive basis as part of the government assignment and the outsourcing method, digitizing on its own — by scanning the institution and volunteer exchanging electronic copies of documents. Among the main organizations - partners of the Presidential Library, there will still be the largest archives of our country, libraries and museums, as well as private individuals.