Approximately 13 million cases are stored in the State Archival Fund of Belarus

May 20, Minsk / Olga Shvaiko - BELTA /. The State Archival Fund of Belarus currently holds about 13 million documents. This was announced by Vladimir Adamushko, Director of the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice, at the international scientific conference "Past and Present: Archives in the System of Humanitarian Knowledge," according to a BELTA correspondent. The conference brought together leading archivists, historians, encyclopedists, librarians, and museum workers from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in Minsk. The forum is dedicated to a wide range of issues, but its main goal is to exchange experience and opinions in the field of archival science. In an interview with a BELTA correspondent, Andrei Rybakov, Director of the Belarusian Research Institute of Document Management and Archival Science, noted that the archival industry is currently at a turning point in its development. On the one hand, archives in the traditional sense are associated with history, their main task being the preservation of documentation – sources of information. On the other hand, in the modern world, the archival system faces daily challenges. "These include changes in socio-economic and political conditions, and thus the transformation of society, consciousness, the emergence of non-state forms of ownership, etc. As a result of these transformations, documentation is generated that is also of certain interest. In this regard, questions arise concerning exactly which documents need to be preserved, how long they need to be stored, what should be kept in organizations, and what should be transferred to state archives," said Andrei Rybakov. No less important aspect of the development of the archival industry is the use of modern information technologies. And there are difficulties here too, in particular, in the area of storing and acquiring documents that were originally created on electronic media, and converting traditional paper documents into electronic form. By the way, specialists have calculated that if one person were to be assigned to digitize 15 million documents, it would take about 3.5 billion years. Answering the question about the role of archives in modern society, the director of the institute said that there is no single answer. "In any case, the main task of the archival service is to preserve documentary memory, that which contains information about our past, present, and can be used in the future," he noted. The conference was organized by the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice of Belarus, the National Archives, the Belarusian Research Institute of Document Management and Archival Science, and the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Main Department of Justice of the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee. The event is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Vitebsk Scientific Archival Commission.-0-