The Vitebsk Regional Library has compiled an electronic collection of rare documents on the history of the region

February 11, Vitebsk / Sergey Kochetov - BELTA /. The V. Lenin Vitebsk Regional Library has created the region's only electronic collection of over 300 rare full-text publications containing documents on the history of the Vitebsk Governorate. This was reported to a BELTA correspondent by the library director, Alexander Semkin. The "Vitebsk Region: Documentary Heritage" project was implemented in cooperation with the National Library of Belarus. The collection includes digital copies of original books published in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Initially, employees of the local history department conducted research and compiled a list of documents of interest to researchers of the region's history that could form the basis of the collection. This list mainly included materials from the collections of the National Library of Belarus, whose specialists digitized the unique publications at the request of the Vitebsk library. The regional library systematized the documents and created an information resource that is freely accessible. Now, library visitors have access to over 50,000 pages of textual information in digital format containing data on the history of the Vitebsk Governorate. First and foremost, these are the "Vitebsk Governorate Directories" from 1881 to 1914, which were published annually by the Vitebsk Learned Archive Commission and are dedicated to a chronological description of the main events in the governorate. The collection also includes "Reviews of the Vitebsk Governorate," encyclopedic publications on education, agriculture, spiritual, and other spheres of life in the governorate. In addition, the project features publications by famous Vitebsk scholars and local historians: A. Sapunov, E. Romanov, and N. Nikiforovsky ("Polotsk, Vitebsk, and Minsk in the 1920s," "Consecrated Objects and the Common People's Attitude Towards Them," "Cosmogonic and Cultural Tales," "Pages from the Recent Past of Vitebsk Belarus," etc.). A significant aid in searching for documents for the collection was the acquisition in 2009 of a digital copy of the "Catalog of the Library of the Vitebsk Learned Archive Commission (as of December 1, 1911)," as in the early 20th century, the book collection of the Learned Archive Commission became the foundation for the creation of the regional library. The original of this book, published in 1912, is kept in the collection of the British Library. The creation of the electronic collection has expanded access to historical information for historians, local historians, and everyone interested in history, as well as opportunities for research work by scholars and university students. Furthermore, such projects contribute to the popularization of the culture and history of the native region, noted Alexander Semkin. The next stage of its implementation will involve working with archival and library institutions in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, whose collections may also contain documents of interest to specialists on the history of the Vitebsk Governorate, he added. -0-