Kherson region digitises state archive: part of documents available online

Kherson Regional Archive. Documents that were not touched by the Russian military. 9 December 2022. Photo: Suspilne Kherson

Over the past five years, the State Archives of the Kherson Oblast has digitised only 2% of its documents. But even this allowed the archive to preserve important data under occupation. Some documents are now freely available.

According to the Kherson Regional Archives, most requests are for digitised documents related to genealogy, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the struggle for Ukrainian independence in 1918-1921.

«When Kherson region was occupied, our archive was also occupied and partially looted, but thanks to the digitisation programme of our archival collections, we managed to preserve a significant part of the stolen funds in digital form», said Iryna Lopushynska, director of the regional State Archives.

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The archive is currently focusing on digitising the documents of executive authorities that help citizens restore their rights to property and land lost due to the war. The archive also has its own website where employees publish digital copies of documents.

«Everything is freely available, absolutely free of charge, you don't have to pay for anything. We do not have watermarks and everything can be downloaded for researching your own genealogy or for scientific needs», the archivist said.

International partners also help the archive with the electronic preservation of documents. Last year, the institution signed an agreement with the international corporation «Family Search», which provided modern equipment to speed up the process.

As a reminder, Kyiv has completed the digitisation of the entire database of documents from the BTI archive, which will make this data mobile and protect it from raider attacks.