NLR Online Projects
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  4. About the Project
  5. About the Project

About Project

The online project continues a programme of the National Library of Russia to make our important manuscripts freely available to anyone with an internet. The resource will be updated as new comments are added to the documents.

The Voltaire Library in the National Library of Russia preserves five volumes containing 1800 leaves, 167 documents under a common shelfmark РНБ. БВ. 5–242. Most of documents were sent to Voltaire from the St. Petersburg Academy of Science at the end of 1750s to work on The History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great (Histoire de l’empire de Russie,  t. 1–2, Genève, 1759–1763).

These documents are translations into French of historical sources, statistical reports and essays prepared specifically for Voltaire. Here is collected information about the activities and personality of Peter the Great — chronological lists of his most important achievements, information about international negotiations of Peter and his ambassadors, letters from Peter and other persons. There are economic, geographical, statistical, historical, ethnographic materials; descriptions of cities, manufactories, rivers and canals, reports on state trade with different countries, descriptions of Siberian peoples.

The online presentation of the manuscripts was created with use of the Depositary Information Retrieval System, developed by the Library's specialists to form a database of the manuscripts. This search system makes it possiple to link digital pages of the manuscript with the relevant reference information from the database. This tool allows you to link a digital copy of the manuscript with an analytical description, transliteration of the source text, translation and description of quotations, and the necessary comments, as well as provide it with a search engine.

The project was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.

 

The Depositary Information Retrieval System was developed by the specialists of the National Library of Russia to form an electronic database of the manuscript colections. This search system makes it possiple to link digital pages of a manuscript with the relevant information from the database. The system is used as a multifunctional resource when working with manuscripts — starting from registration and scientific description of the manuscript in an electronic database and ending with an electronic copy of the manuscript or collection on the Internet.

Software development kits: MS Visual C#, DBMS MS SQL Server 2008 R2.

The Depository System is predicated on the idea that each handwritten book is not only a source of information, but a monument of written culture. Therefore, the manuscript must be studied and described comprehensively — both in terms of the content and as an object of material culture. In accordance with this, the Depository System consists of fields that enable to register and provide search for all important elements of the cataloged manuscript. The essential part of the Depository System are basic directories that ensure unified terminology and efficient search.

The Depository System is based on the two-hundred-year tradition of Russian archeography. The systemt implements principles of "reliability in working with manuscripts", which were put forward by academician D. S. Likhachev ( see: Likhachev D. S. Textology (rus Tekstologiya). Leningrad, "Nauka", 1983. Pp. 114–116) as the most important for modern source study.

The practical basis for the system was the RUSMARC bibliographic format adopted by the National Library of Russia. At the same time, detailed structured-field information of the database allows you to convert data into any standard, as well as "upload" one or another selected set of data for various Internet projects, in particular, enter data into the electronic on-line catalogue of the library.