=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2784/rpaper15
|storemode=property
|title=Open Archives of the SB RAS: Systems of Historical Factography
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2784/rpaper15.pdf
|volume=Vol-2784
|authors=Irina Krayneva,Alexander Marchuk
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ssi/KraynevaM20
}}
==Open Archives of the SB RAS: Systems of Historical Factography==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2784/rpaper15.pdf
Open Archives of the SB RAS:
Systems of Historical Factography
Irina Krayneva1[0000-0002-0601-9795] and Alexander Marchuk2[0000-0001-8455-725X]
1.
A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Russian Ac. of Sci., Siberian Branch
6, Lavrentjev pr., 630090, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation;
National Research Tomsk State University
36, Lenin pr., 634050, Tomsk, Russian Federation;
2
A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Russian Ac. of Sci., Siberian Branch
6, Lavrentjev pr., 630090, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
Krayneva55@gmail.com
Abstract. Interdisciplinary cooperation between humanities and IT specialists,
open scientific communications, high-quality information are the main goals of
our academic service projects. This paper presents a brief summary of the twen-
ty years of research carried out at the A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Sys-
tems SB RAS in the area of developing electronic archives for heterogeneous
documents. The phenomenon of electronic archives emerged and has been de-
veloping as part of the Novosibirsk school of informatics, which has always
been oriented towards the contracting of social services. Over the years, the IIS
SB RAS has completed a range of projects on digitizing historical and cultural
heritage of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The team
created a number of information systems for the support of electronic archives
on the history of science in Siberia: the Academician Andrei Ershov Electronic
Archive, SB RAS Photoarchive, SB RAS Open Archive, a collection of digit-
ized vintage and old textbooks on mathematics, etc. However, staff cuts in the
SB RAS Presidium undercut the ongoing contributions to the SB RAS Scientific
Archive. By no means can our projects substitute the function of that archive.
We aim at complementing it to preserve valuable historical facts that are often
overlooked by the government and institutional archives.
Keywords: high-quality information, open archives, digital archives, interdisci-
plinarity, history of science, Siberian Branch of RAS.
1 Introduction
The wide use of information technologies in the Russian humanities came along with
the mass appearance of personal computers and the Internet in the mid-1990s. The
idea of interdisciplinary cooperation of humanities and IT specialists at the dawn of
the Internet was based chiefly on the concept of open scientific communication. Es-
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
190
sentially this is a cluster of civil society supported by professionals, where necessity
and responsibility go side by side. An American computer scientist, recipient of the
Turing Award, James Nicolas “Jim” Gray (1940–?) proposed the concept of the
fourth paradigm of scientific research with massive amounts of data using grid tech-
nology – an archive of science [1]. Gray and his followers stress the need for system-
atic arrangement and free access to scientific entities, such as experimental data or
modeling results in physics. The idea of a virtual scientific archive for humanities
research is indisputably just as relevant. In view of the empirically proven positive
influence of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the activities of
scientific workers, open access to information becomes a priority [2].
Equipping museums, libraries, universities and research institutions with comput-
ers and providing access to the Internet resulted in a wider range of user practices in
humanities and in the emergence of Internet-oriented resources. They are used to
publish museum collections, library catalogues, full texts, research and reference tools
for archives as well as complete individual collections. This initiative became deeply
rooted in the activities of cultural and academic institutions in Russia. In the Novosi-
birsk Scientific Center, the implementation of a number of projects on electronic ar-
chives dealing with various documents became possible with the deployment of the
Novosibirsk Scientific Center Internet Network (1994–1998, Soros Foundation,
RFBR, INTAS – The International Association for the Promotion of Cooperation with
Scientists from the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union). It provided
organizations and research institutions of the SB RAS with free access to the Internet
[3].
The IIS SB RAS team in Novosibirsk has been working on projects on open ar-
chives since 1999. The projects are based on the digital historical factography tech-
nology. The technology implies publishing historical sources in Internet-oriented
information systems according to the rules of publishing archival documents. This
includes indicating the origin and source of the documents as well as a number of
typological features such as the document type, author, addressee (a person or an
organization), date, geographical data, etc. Specialized information systems devel-
oped in the IIS SB RAS offer tools for establishing connections between these subject
entities. Quoting documents from an electronic archive is supported both as an Inter-
net link and by indicating a specific file and sheet in the archive. These systems are
viewed as a viable alternative to the existing brick-and-mortar archives and require a
state-supported program on their implementation and support. Apart from concentrat-
ing, systemizing, dating and describing sources, they serve as the foundation of a
range of research project.
2 Academician A.P. Ershov’s Digital Archive
In 1999, the IIS SB RAS team began their work on an automated information system
for the creation and support of a digital archive of documents – the Academician
A.P. Ershov’s (1931–1988) Digital Archive http://ershov.iis.nsk.su/. From 1957
through 1988, Andrei Ershov was the head of the Programming department – first in
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the Computing Center of the Institute of Mathematics, from 1964on – in the Compu-
ting Center SB AS USSR. A modest but challenging position, an outstanding academ-
ic career (1962 – Candidate of Sciences, 1967 – Doctor of Physics and Mathematics,
1971 – Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, 1984 – Academician),
unconventional research projects and personal charisma – all this contributed to Er-
shov becoming the universally acknowledged leader of Soviet programming, a re-
spected member of the international computer science community, and founder of
informatics in Siberia. He devoted a lot of time to his personal archive, which is now
a valuable source of information on the history of programming in the USSR. The
archive covers a period from 1949, when the future Academician was still a school
student, to 2015.
Fig. 1. Andrei Petrovich Ershov in his office in Computing Center of the SB RAS. A year
before the elections to the USSR Academy of Sciences. Novosibirsk, 1969.
The creation of the A.P. Ershov’s Archive was supervised by Alexander Marchuk
(Doct. Ph.-M. Sci.) and a scientific researcher from his laboratory, Vladimir Filippov.
The system was developed by two postgraduates of the Mechanico-Mathematical
Department of Novosibirsk State University: Andrey Nemov, Konstsntin Fedorov and
a Bachelor student, Sergey Antyufeev. The concept of the system was developed by
Mikhail Bulyonkov (Cand. Ph.-M. Sci.), a computer scientist, Natalya Cheremnykh, a
mathematical linguist, and Irina Krayneva, a historian. Irina Pavlovskaya, Svetlana
Zhukovskaya, Alexander Rar (1928–2011), Liudmila Zmievskaya, Natalia Polyudo-
va, and Anna Bulyonkova all contributed a lot to document description and manage-
ment of the archive. The development of the digital version of the Archive was sup-
192
ported by a number of Russian and foreign IT companies, (Microsoft Research,
xTech, ATAPY Software, UNIPRO) [4].
In the process of creating the first academic project of the Internet-oriented infor-
mation system “Academician A.P. Ershov’s Digital archive,” the team solved the
problem of developing original client-server program tools, using predominantly Mi-
crosoft instruments and technologies. The archivist’s work space was implemented in
Perl. Using digitized documents is beneficial not only in terms of communicative
convenience, but also ergonomically, since many specialists working with archival
sources suffer from a number of ailments caused by prolonged exposure to old paper
and dust.
Fig. 2. The list of subject and chronological groups of the Academician A.P. Ershov Digital
Archive.
The developers assumed that the public interface of the archive had to be visual-
ized in the same way as it was intended by the creator, i.e. it had to correspond to the
physical body of documents from the A.P. Ershov’s archive. Ershov formed his fold-
ers by the subject-date or subject, and that principle remained unchanged. Folders and
sheets were numbered and scanned; corrections were minor and dealt with removing
duplicates, chronological arrangement, and recovering authorship and dates. The
physical archive formed by Ershov was complemented with a number of documents
from government-run archives that came up in the process of studying the scientist’s
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biography. The digital version supports two types of systematization: folder-based
and subject-and-date based, presented as a corresponding catalog.
Apart from documents from Ershov’s archive proper, the Digital Archive contains
materials on the history of the IIS SB RAS, Start Temporary Research and Technolo-
gy Team (VNTK «Start», 1985–1988), and the International Andrei Ershov Memorial
Conference on the Perspectives of System Informatics (PSI), which has been held and
hosted by the IIS SB RAS since 1990. These collections are thematically connected
with the main body of documents from Ershov’s Archive. There is also a satellite
collection of documents of Svyatoslav Sergeevich Lavrov (1923–2004, Saint-
Petersburg), a Corresponding Member of the USSR AS, provided to the IIS SB RAS
by his followers for the purpose of publishing the collection in the Internet. As of
March, 2019, there source contained 44.4 thousand documents.
Work on Academician A.P. Ershov’s Digital Archive turned out to be a rather sci-
ence-intensive project. Apart from a series of research papers published based on the
study of the documents from this collection, the members of the team published mon-
ographs and defended four theses on the history of science (two by Irina Krayneva in
Tomsk, one by Ksenia Tatarchenko in Princeton and one by Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
in Harvard) [5, 6]. The study of the archive continues, and its hermeneutical potential
is still far from exhaustion.
3 Photographic Archive of the SB RAS
Shortly before the 50th Anniversary of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of
Sciences (formerly the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), which was founded in
1957, an initiative group from the IIS SB RAS headed by Alexander Marchuk began
to work on a project called “Digital Photographic Archive of the SB RAS”
http://www.soran1957.ru (2005–2009). The resource merged various collections and
individual photographs dealing with the history of science in Siberia into a single
body of documents; the photographs were supplied by photographers, reporters, or-
ganizations, such as the Museum, Exhibition Center, Press Center, and various re-
search institutes of the SB RAS, as well as by private collectors.
The creation of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, a Town of Science, became a land-
mark event in the history of Novosibirsk in the 20 th century. Eventually, scientific
centers appeared in other Siberian towns, including Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Omsk.
The photographic archive of Akademgorodok was started by its founder, Academi-
cian Mikhail Lavrentiev. He invited a photographer, Rashid Akhmerov (1926–2017),
who at the time had been photographing the daily life of the institutes of the West
Siberian Branch of the USSRAS. Later, other professional photographers joined the
initiative, along with many amateurs. Nowadays, new contributions to the Archive
come primarily from personal collections. Recently, the Archive received the photo-
graphic collection of the Quant («Kvant ») Club of the NSU Physics Department. The
effort was beneficial to the historical knowledge of Akademgorodok not only because
of the creation of the collection as such, but also because open access publication led
to correct dating and description of many of the photos. result of the conducted exper-
iments the obtained fields of the model characteristics have been analyzed and plot-
194
ted. Several fields such as sea level field, temperature field and ice coverage in the
Polar Ocean are presented below.
Fig.3. The collection of photos of Academician Mikhail A. Lavrentyev in the SB RAS Photo-
graphic Archive
Fig. 4. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, gets
acquainted with the development plan of the Academgorodok. He sharply criticized it, after
which high-rise buildings disappeared from the project. Photo by Rashid Akhmerov. 1959,
October.
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A specialized information system – SORAN 1957 – was developed for the SB
RAS Photographic Archive. It is a structure designed for collecting, structuring and
digital publishing of historical data and documents, which supports program and or-
ganizational mechanisms key to the achievement of these purposes. SORAN 1957
includes a system of structured data that represent entities of the real world and rela-
tionships between then. The structuring system is based on the Semantic Web ideolo-
gy. This approach consists in structuring data according to anontology. Ontology is a
formal specification of a shared conceptual model – an abstract model of a subject
area describing a system of concepts of the subject area. The shared model is a con-
ventional understanding of the conceptual model by a specific community (a group of
people). “Specification” here presumes describing the conceptual system explicitly,
and “formal” presumes that the conceptual model is machine-readable. An ontology
consists of classes of the subject area, properties of these classes, and connections
between them. To solve a broad range of information problems, the IIS SB RAS built
a basic ontology. The created software tools enable input and editing of data and us-
ing data from other sources (newspapers in particular).
Currently, the Photographic Archive database contains information on approxi-
mately 7,000 persons, 2,000 organizations and events, along with 24,000 scans of
photographic documents. Before their submission to the database, photographic scans
are repaired, both automatically and manually, using graphic software tools including
color, brightness and contrast correction, noise, dust and damage removal, etc., in a
way that does not affect the contents of the document. Documents are scanned in a
resolution sufficient for consequent reprinting, from 300 to 1200 dpi, as uncom-
pressed tif files in RGB color model. Documents in jpg format created using modern
digital devices are also included in the archive.
The SB RAS Digital Photographic Archive platform also hosts the archive of the
weekly newspaper of the Siberian Branch, “Nauka v Sibiri” (Science in Siberia),
which was named “Za Nauku v Sibiri” (For Science in Siberia) until 1983; the news-
paper has been published since 1961 and has its own website with an archive page
(http://www.nsc.ru/HBC/). The newspaper archive is thematically linked with the
photographic archive and was systematized based on the entities existing in the pho-
tographic archive (persons, organizations, events, etc.). To retain the quality and min-
imize the volume of transmitted and processed information on the client’s side, Deep
Zoom technology was used – a solution for Web-publishing high-resolution images
from Microsoft. Silverlight, a browser technology allowing to view an image in gen-
eral and zoom into its specific part, linking it to some existing entities, was also used.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Research terminated the support of this tool, and we are
currently searching for an alternative solution.
4 Open Archive of the SB RAS
The experience gained in the projects described above has allowed us to expand the
subject coverage range of historical sources. Beginning from 2012, the “SB RAS
Open Archive as a system of presentation, accumulation and systematization of scien-
tific heritage” project has been implemented, with financial support in 2012-2014
(http://odasib.ru/). Apart from the IIS SB RAS, a number of humanities institutes of
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the SB RAS participated in this project: The Institute of History, Institute of Archeol-
ogy and Ethnography, Russian National Public Library of Science and Technology;
Institute of Mongolian Studies, Buddhology and Tibetology, and museum depart-
ments of these institutes. Each of the participants presented their own specific collec-
tion accumulated in the course of their professional activity. Currently, the SB RAS
Open Archive contains 24 individual collections, with approximately 90,000 docu-
ment scans as of November 1, 2020.
Fig. 4. The main page of the SB RAS Open Archive.
The creation of Internet-oriented information systems broadens the coverage range,
making low-demand archives accessible to the general public, and provides access to
collections which fall outside the current range of scientific interests of the SB RAS
Scientific Archive and other state- or institution-run archives. Contributions to the
Open Archive come from private collections on conditions negotiated with the collec-
tion owners.
The collection of the Open Archive includes personal collections of the mathema-
tician Abram Fet, engineer Igor Poletaev, sociologist Tatiana. Zaslavskaya, her sister
philologist Maya Cheremisina, mathematician Aleksey Lyapunov, theoretical physi-
cist Yuri Rumer and others. Another group of collections is formed by the archives of
scientific and educational organizations: the ethnographic collections of the Institute
197
of Archeology and Ethnography, Russian National Public Library of Science and
Technology, Institute of Mongolian Studies, Buddhology and Tibetology, documents
on the history of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics, Physics and Mathematics
School, and Higher College of Informatics. The third group of collections is archives
from social and creative organizations of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok: Vertical rock
climbing club, Pod Integralom (Under the Integral) café club, Akademgorodok thea-
ter-studio, Open Society Institute, etc. The collections of spoken history and memo-
ries of people professionally and personally bound with Akademgorodok form yet
another separate group. The Open Archive is continuously expanded, as new collec-
tions are added.
Fig. 6. An example of document description and visualization (A. A. Lyapunov’s letters from
the front, 1943) in the SB RAS Open Archive. Lyapunov says that he got a guards badge - a
symbol of a soldier's courage. He also writes that he has paper for notes, binoculars, a
stopwatch, cases with drawing instruments, many special devices for controlling shooting and
for topographic work, and revolver! He was happy!
5 Analogies and Problems
Currently there are many resources created for the accumulation of historical and
cultural heritage in a digital format. Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo
archive, stretching from the 1750s to today, are now available for the first time
through the joint work of LIFE and Google (2008). Digital collections of the Science
History Institute (https://digital.sciencehistory.org/) includes 6,508 digitized items:
artifacts, photographs, advertisements, letters, rare books. Library of Congress
(https://www.loc.gov/) and digital collections of UNESCO
(https://digital.archives.unesco.org/en/collection) are the most impressive ones.
198
Though, they have no catalogue helping to establish connections between documents.
One of the main problems faced by the creators of these projects was financing. In
2015, UNESCO launched a fundraising project to digitize the archives of the
Organization belonging to its predecessors, including the League of Nations
International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. Two years later, thanks to the
generous support of the Japanese government, UNESCO launched a major two-year
initiative. In partnership with the digitization company Picturae BV, in February
2018, a laboratory was established at the site of UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.
Financing a project is a painful question for us as well.
The funding of any research projects by Russian foundations is such that they can
willingly provide finance for the launch of the project but not for its support and
development. At present, we are not raising sponsor funds since the project of
A.P. Ershov’s Archive has been virtually completed. The remaining digital projects of
the Institute of Informatics Systems of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy
of Sciences are carried out within the framework of the government assignment to the
Institute on the theme “Research of the fundamentals of data structuring, information
resources management, creation of information and computing systems and
environments for science and education.” The purpose of this study is the
development of automated support methods for ontology design. The bottleneck in
this direction so far is the creation of more accurate search tools, text recognition
tools, and hiring qualified personnel.
6 Conclusion and Outlook
Since the mid-1980s, the European community has launched projects supporting
specialists engaged in the preservation, conservation and dissemination of knowledge
about the heritage with the help of digital reality: Framework Program for Research &
Technological Development FR1, 1984–1987, prolonged until 2013, with HORIZON
2020 as its successor [14]. In addition to the programs supporting appropriate
research, special-purpose centers were set up in some countries, such as the U.K. and
France, to provide the long-term storage and access to software [7, 8]. Moreover, the
European Commission is planning to launch a single European Open Science Cloud
for storing, exchanging and reusing research data in a variety of areas and support its
infrastructure.
In Russia, apparently, the critical mass required for making such decisions at the
national level has yet to be achieved. The Russian State Archives have begun
publicizing their meetings and reference apparatus fairly recently, later than other
institutions keeping historical sources. The Archive of the Russian Academy of
Sciences (RAS) is the umbrella association for launching a universal corporate
resource (http://www.isaran.ru). The Science Archive of the Siberian Branch RAS,
however, neither digitizes its collections nor represents itself in the Internet. This is an
urgent issue of the SB RAS and Russian Ministry for Science and Education. The
structural changes undergoing in the RAS Siberian Branch in connection with
reforming the Russian Academy of Sciences have so far ignored the SB RAS archival
activity. Therefore, the future of the SB RAS Science Archive is uncertain. This most
valuable collection of documents on the development of Siberian science is in danger
199
of neglect because the SB RAS Presidium has no funds to maintain or, more
importantly, to develop it. The SB RAS Science Archive established simultaneously
with the RAS Siberian Branch in 1958 possesses a richest array of representative
sources on the history of science in Siberia. It includes 86 collections and 52,219 files
including 9,356 personal files. Until now, the Archive’s collections have not been
digitized for professional or public purposes, and the Archive has no electronic
resources of its own (even though the SB RAS State Public Scientific-Technical
Library has the Internet connection). With a view to preserving the unique historical
documents, we need to digitize them and establish permanent repositories of datasets
using cloud technologies. Within the framework of the project SB RAS Open
Archive, which is in line with the all-Russia trend for the extensive use of information
and communication technologies in the cultural and scientific spheres, the IIS has
pioneered the organization of archival work in the RAS Siberian Branch. We expect
that our experience will be in demand.
In 2014–2017, the research was partially funded by the RFBR grant 15-07-345А
«Establishment and development of scientific schools of programming in leading
scientific centers of the USSR», and joint project of RFBR and the Novosibrisk Dis-
trict № 19-49-540001«Institutes of Novosibirsk are named after them: life history of
outstanding scientists of the XX century».
Translate by Tatiana Bulyonkova.
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