Documents of the military and post-war periods were digitized in Crimea

2024: Digitization of military and post-war documents

ELAR Corporation has translated into electronic form an array of documents for the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea - the project included not only digitization, but also the preparation of dilapidated, diverse materials for work. Elar announced this on October 9, 2024.

source = Elar

GKU RK "State Archive of the Republic of Crimea" and ELAR Corporation have been working together to digitize funds and create an electronic archive since 2015. There are more than 1 million cases in the archive, so the transfer of information into electronic form is carried out in stages. The institution notes that the projects are aimed at expanding and facilitating access to the documents of the Archive Fund, ensuring the safety of the originals by withdrawing them from circulation and providing access to the electronic fund for use, simplifying the provision of public services.

As part of the current stage of digitization, electronic copies were created for 392 storage units - the Corporation's specialists digitized archival businesses for the period from 1944 to 1961 and from 1966 to 1970. They include, in particular, permits for construction, commissioning, certificates of expertise with drawings, master plans, schemes, minutes of meetings of the interdepartmental commission, urban planning council.

The peculiarity of the array is that the main part of the documents is made on multi-format sheets in a format from less than A4 to A1. Each case contains up to 250 sheets, including those with non-standard large-format tabs, materials on tracing paper and papyrus paper. At the same time, the cases themselves are dilapidated, sewn and decorated in solid covers.

Before the scanning process, ELAR specialists embroidered individual cases, in cases where scanning was impossible without losing part of the text in the binding, the sheets also damaged and torn in the binding were subject to preliminary restoration. Further, careful contactless digitization of dilapidated documents was carried out on professional planetary scanners, which saved archival documents from any new damage. The resulting images were processed, indexed and uploaded to the previously created AIS ELAR-archive. Work on filling the electronic database of the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea will continue.

2017

On August 9, 2017, Elar Corporation announced the implementation of work on digitizing the inventory of the funds of the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea and the introduction of an automated information system in the institution. The company won the relevant tenders and will fulfill obligations under contracts by the end of 2017.

Project objectives

Digitization of inventories of funds of the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea is carried out in order to ensure the safety of the scientific reference apparatus (NSA), as well as to optimize the mechanisms for access of users and employees of the institution to information about documents. Elar will scan a total of 32 thousand pages of inventories, index and create 140 thousand database records containing case header texts for download to the archive information systems.

The company will also introduce in the state archive a software product of its own design AIS "ELAR-Archive." The platform serves to automate the acquisition, accounting, storage and use of documents of the Archive Fund of the Russian Federation and is already used in archival institutions of more than 50 constituent entities of the Russian Federation, including in the archive of the city of Sevastopol.

Contractor selection

The competition for the digitization of the NSA of the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea was held as a competition with limited participation, according to Art. 56 of the law 44-FZ "On the contract system."

Only companies that confirmed the experience of implementing similar projects, the availability of the necessary equipment and a staff of qualified specialists could be admitted to the tender, "said Alexander Komissarov, deputy head of the archives department. - Strict requirements for the contractor are imposed, since archival inventories are one of the most difficult types of documents for digitization. For example, it is necessary to scan each sheet with high quality in one pass, and rescanning is not allowed.