February 25^th, there was organised the first webinar for the participants of the “Rare and Valuable Books” project which has just been restarted. Among the specialists to join in there were librarians from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Maikop and Belgorod, Perm and Lipetsk, Novocherkassk, Lugansk, Samara, Barnaul, Pskov and other cities, alongside with professionals from high and higher educational establishments, museums and rural libraries.

The adviser of the direction board of the RSL, chair of the RSL expert council and of the working group on including rare and valuable books into the National Digital Library Natalia Samoylenko opened the meeting with her report on the six years of the work on the project and on its nearest prospects. Then, the speech by Diana Ivanova, the director of the RSL Legal department, dealt with the essential copyright matters. How to distinguish whether a document is copyright or not, where to check the terms and what to do with the works by people who were rehabilitated more than once (as, for instance, it happened with Joseph Mandelshtam etc.)  – all that was being considered with maximum care and attention to details. Another thing to be focused on was licence agreements with right owners. Diana Vassiliyevna would point out at the moments when due to certain mistakes those agreements could legally go out of force.

Irina Rudenko, head of the RSL Department of scientific and methodology support of work with rare and valuable books spoke on the thematic sections. A moment of importance was the information that it became possible to re-digitize documents which could be found significant for the development of a particular section. After that Olga Smelova, the specialist of the Department of registering and digitising rare and valuable books of the Russian State Library, touched upon the purely practical issues of work with the collections.

The meeting was terminated by Tatyana Sidorova, head of the RSL Department of registering and digitising rare and valuable books. The speaker outlined the plans for the development of English and Chinese versions of the website for foreigners which came to be in want of because of the high popularity of the resource both within the territory of the Russian Federation and abroad. Besides, Tatyana Nikolaevna pointed out that the presentation with all the important details mentioned in the speech by Diana Ivanova was going to be published on the Telegram channel of the RSL “Rare and Valuable Books” project office at https://t.me/s/knpam.

The stream of the webinar is available on the link.

All you could ever wish to get to know about the project can be found on the portal of the National Digital Library in section “Rare and Valuable Books” at https://kp.rusneb.ru/item/page/info.