“Maps and Drafts in the Presidential Library’s Collections” webinar

In November 2019, the Presidential Library hosted an informational and methodological webinar entitled “Maps and Drafts in the Presidential Library’s Collections”. As part of the webinar, readers and specialists of Russian libraries were presented materials from the electronic collections on the history of discoveries and exploration of new lands, geography and geographical research, which are reflected in various cartographic documents.

At the webinar, the head of the cartography department of the National Library of Russia Svetlana Sviridenko spoke about interesting experience working with the richest cartographic collections of the National Library of Russia.

In the course of the web-conference, the Presidential Library’s specialists demonstrated a variety of atlases that spotlighted both the general territory of the country and its individual parts - for example, the atlas of Asian Russia. In addition to the atlases of territorial division, thematic atlases were also presented at the webinar: a pocket postal atlas of the entire Russian Empire, for example, or an educational church-historical atlas. Web conference participants were also able to get familiar with various printed and manuscript maps, sea charts and locations, military cartography, as well as cartographic materials that are part of archival information.

The documents presented at the webinar are available at any of the centers of remote access to the resources of the Presidential Library located throughout Russia and abroad. In addition, some of the materials are presented on the library’s portal on-line. At the end of the webinar, participants were encouraged to find cartographic materials in the Presidential Library’s collections.

All these rarities are available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library, some of which are presented on the institution’s portal. Among the unique publications are: “Atlas of Russia, consisting of nineteen special maps representing the All-Russian Empire with frontier lands” (1745); “The Plan of Tver [Maps]” with drawings by Palmquist (1902); “Maps and Atlases” (1941) by N. V. Vinogradov, edited by Professor M. S. Bodnarsky and engineer M. P. Murashov; “The exploration of Kamchatka and Bering’s Kamchatka expeditions. 1725-1742" L. S. Berg (1935) and others.