February 2, the “PRO.Culture.RF” portal broadcast the first for the year of 2023 webinar devoted to the “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project. The matters dealt with covered those ones which could be interesting not only for newbies, but for the organizations which had already been in project for a certain period of time.   

The speakers were

·        Tatiana Sidorova, head of the Department of Registration and Digitilization of Rare and Valuable Books of the RSL “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project office, and

·        Irina Rudenko, head of the RSL Department of Research and Methodology Support of Work with Rare and Valuable Books, senior researcher of the Rare Book Research Department.

Ms Sidorova started her speech with general information on the “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project which had been launched in 2019 within the framework of the “Culture” project (federal project “Digital Culture”). 8,000 documents were digitized every year, 3,000 of which were supplied by the RSL and the RNL, while the part of regional libraries remained 2,000 items annually. All the digitized documents were posted on website knpam.rusneb.ru. 

The representatives of the regional organizations were invited to join the project, while the participants of the previous years were welcomed to go on digitizing their rare and valuable collection items. The rules would remain the same. Still the year of 2023 witnessed certain changes especially introduced to simplify the work of the project participants:

·        There were added 5 new thematic sections;

·        There was introduced a capability to refer a document to several thematic sections at a time;

·        There were added templates and drop-downs;

·        Requests could be emailed or arranged via feed-back form (with folding attachments);

·        There was worked out a capability for excluding document duplications when registering editions for the project (when inputting a storage cipher, it would turn red if an edition with the same digits had been registered earlier);

·        There was introduced a page-counted compensation for digitization of documents. 

In continuation of the topic of work with collection items to be registered as rare and valuable books, Ms Rudenko chose to pay a particular attention to the three matters as follows:

·        Selecting a document in compliance with the special criteria and methodological recommendations,

·        Describing the documents selected,

·        Preparing the accompanying forms.

The speaker reminded the audience that in 2023 there was changed the chronological framework for national editions and those ones from abroad. For the section of “Books of the Romanovs” there was added the list of persons whose books could enter the collection of rare and valuable books from that moment on.

Taking into consideration the experience of the previous years, the participants of the “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project were advised to describe the editions they offered according to the de visu principle, with a due page-by-page examination of the collection items. The technical means for describing objects were also updated.

To conclude, the representatives of the RSL “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project office encouraged the viewers to ask all possible kinds of questions, to use the reference materials of the kp.rusneb.ru website, and they also pointed out that the information on all the changes, that including the sums of money compensations, will be mailed to all the webinar participants.

You are welcome to view the whole of the video over here.

The new meeting was announced for March-April, 2023.

Twice a month there are held tutorials for the participants of the “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” project on the official RSL “Knizhniye Pamiatniki” Telegram channel.