«During the war, not a single document was damaged»: the Mykolaiv archive began digitizing materials to preserve information

The State Archive of the Mykolaiv Region continues to digitize all available documents to ensure the preservation of materials in the form of high-quality digital copies.

Director of the State Archive of the Mykolaiv Oblast Nataliia Kolesnyk told about this during the briefing, «NikVesti» reports.

As of October 2023, the archive has fully resumed operations and is accepting people. However, during active hostilities, as the director of the institution says, the archive lost archival information that had been digitized before the war.

— Unfortunately, during the explosions, a cluster munition hit the wall behind which was the server storage. We lost both the server and the data store. We spent almost six months restoring this information. We also turned to technical donors, they gave us cloud storage so that we could upload information there. This war showed that not only we are looking for donors, but they are also looking for us. Today we have a new server and are working quickly. We can provide an answer to people's requests both in an electronic version, and we send these documents by mail, — Nataliia Kolesnyk said.

The official noted that the digitization of documents is a very important tool for today's conditions, which helps to preserve information.

— We have the example of the Kherson State Archive. In general, the documents were taken there. We don't have such cases, there were not even any damage to the documents, — she added.

Today, the archive works in two projects, one of them is cooperation with the international organization FamilySearch, which helps people in researching their family history. In this work, the archive digitized 6,000 cases, covering 29 funds and creating 190,000 digital copies of documents.

— They were initially interested in genealogical information, that is, that which contains personal data. But something changed with the war, the corporation made a decision based on the agreement with the management of the archive, according to which we do not digitize a part of the funds, but the funds as a whole. Thus, we will not have any gaps with certain documents, — Nataliia Kolesnyk said.

Another project with which the archive works is the «Babyn Yar» charitable organization, which covers 8 funds and digitizes 4,000 cases.

— Among the documents that we started to digitize with «Babiny Yar» is a very interesting file of people who lived in Mykolaiv during the Second World War during the occupation. We covered more than 22,000 cards and we know the names of people, the composition of families, with whom they lived in occupied Mykolaiv in 1942-1944, — she said.

In total, the archive stores more than 6,000 funds, totaling almost 1.2 million cases on paper media, the rest on various types: recordings, audio, photos, in particular, on glass.

It will be recalled that the British journalist Frederick Gillingham is shooting a documentary film about the environmental consequences of Russian aggression. Filming is currently taking place in the Mykolayiv region.