Elar digitized ancient Buddhist manuscripts on palm leaves and other materials from Rerikhov fund

2019: Digitization of fund of family Rerikhov

On October 23, 2019 Elar reported that for Museum of art of the people of the East 29,000 graphic images from the Soviet fund of family Rerikhov were transferred to an electronic form, - for the first time the digitized materials became available to users online.

The state Museum of art of the people of the East - one of the largest cultural and educational centers which meeting contains for October, 2019 about 150,000 works of painting, sculptures, diagrams and arts and crafts. Being its Museum branch Rerikhov stores performing painting and graphics of Nikolay Konstantinovich Roerich and his son Svyatoslav Nikolaevich Roerich, big collection of works of arts and crafts from Russia, India, China, Tibet, Mongolia, Egypt and also archive fund of the literary heritage of family.

ELAR corporation digitized versatile materials from A4 to A1 and A0 of formats. It letters of family members, photos, cards, personal diaries and also maps of estates, geographical atlases. It is important to note that materials are digitized for the first time, considering their huge cultural and historical value for judges of creativity of family Rerikhov, it is very important work, comments the associate director of the museum Vladimir Avetisyan

Digitization of the ancient Buddhist texts written on palm sheets and sewed in the book with pages of A2 format became one of the most difficult tasks.

Digitization of Buddhist manuscripts essentially differed from digitization of other materials of archive, - considering bad degree of safety and age, such documents before digitization should have restoration examination, after that the restorer personally brings material and work is possible only at its presence, when using gloves and specially exposed lighting. At the proper handling and under sensitive control of specialists of the museum, the staff of Corporation carried out this complex work at the high level, using a professional equipment of ELAR which ensured complete safety of materials in the course of scanning,

The Museum noted that digitization of archive of the Soviet fund Rerikhov was the first stage in project implementation on providing open access to materials of heritage of this family to citizens of the Russian Federation and foreigners. After digitization and converting of materials in the separate PDF files, all affairs were posted on the official site of the Museum Rerikhov.