The Presidential Library continues to integrate resources

October 25, 2012 at the Presidential Library took place the Third Theoretical and Practical Conference "Cultural Heritage: Integration of Resources in Digital Environment." The ways of integrating resources of major preservers of cultural heritage - libraries, archives and museums - discussed the heads of the Presidential Library, the State Hermitage, the Russian State Historical Archive, representatives of the Council of Rectors of St. Petersburg, and regional authorities.

Opening the conference, Director General of the Presidential Library, Alexander Vershinin, said that the holdings of the library represent an integrated resource that is being created on the basis of cooperation with national and foreign libraries, archives and museums. In three years, the holdings of the Presidential Library have reached the number of 200, 000 items.

The fact that the Presidential Library today has all the facilities to become the center for integration of digitized museum collections was noted in the address of the Director of the State Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky. He told about “The Virtual Museum" project. According to him, the project will allow for a single "site" to combine the resources of various museums across the country, and in addition, to create around each object a entire encyclopedia of digitized documents and materials.

Director of the Russian State Historical Archive, Alexander Sokolov said that he attaches great importance to the creation of electronic copies of the stored documents. Specialists of the Archive are interested in providing valuable documents for work, but many of the materials cannot always be “out on loan” due to their disrepair, but without the use of these documents the further development of science is impossible. Such a contradiction, said Alexander Sokolov, is solved by the conversion of documents into digital format, allowing researchers from all over the world to gain access to valuable archival materials.

About half of the digitized materials that make part of the Presidential Library holdings are digital copies of archival documents, including regional ones.

As noted the Head of the Office of Informatization and Communication of the Presidential Property Management Department of the Russian Federation, Alexander Yakushev, the Presidential Library is a project aimed at the creation of national repository for materials on history, theory and practice of the Russian statehood. But the efforts of the Presidential Library would not be possible without the contribution of its partners, which are now more than 130. He also reminded that the Library is actively used by the Presidential Property Management Department for support of the activities of the Present and the Government of Russia.

In addition to the practical work on the integration, the Presidential Library specialists are engaged with theoretical work on the development of description standards, which would allow integration of resources from libraries, archives and museums in digital environment. At the conference there was presented the next, third edition of the series "Digital Library", prepared by the experts of the Presidential Library. The collection contains articles on the theory and the practice of creation of integrated electronic information resources. The publication will soon be available for download on the library’s web site.

View photos