You're reading: National Taras Shevchenko Museum goes digital

One of Ukraine’s Soviet-era museums has finally gone digital. The Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko Museum received nearly $7,000 in grant money from billionaire Rinat Akhmetov’s Foundation for Development of Ukraine to digitize 9,000 pages of archived material, or just 2 percent of its trove of archives, most of which are more than 100 years old. 

The
material is available free on the museum’s website: http://www.museumshevchenko.org.ua.

Akhmetov’s
foundation supported the endeavor through its I3 – Idea. Impulse. Innovation –
grant program, which provides up to Hr 160,000 for cultural projects in visual
art, cinema, literature, theater and museums.

 “The Taras Shevchenko Museum was just another
one who applied and got support, just as many other cultural establishments and
foundations,” modestly said Natalia Tserklevych, I3 program’s manager.

Mykhailo
Zubar, head of the museum’s virtual archive program, said: “We chose this part
of the archives because it was never fully published and we just cannot give it
to all who want to use it for their studies even in the museum building, the
documents are very old and some are in a pretty bad condition.”

The
digitized archives include the Ukrainian bard’s lifetime works with autographs,
a metric book, handwritten papers and many other precious materials.  All the scanned copies were made using
non-contact scanners that don’t cause calefaction, which it leased from the Electronic
Archives of Ukraine –program’s partner.

“The whole
process took us about three months, while scanning itself only about a month.  Before that we were training our staff,
inviting trainers from ELAU (Electronic Archives of Ukraine),” Zubar said.

A scanned
copy of one archived page cost the museum Hr 5 to Hr 15.

“Digitizing
the archives was the museum’s main priority for the last couple of years and we
keep spending lots of time looking for sponsors and grants to apply for,” Zubar
says. He added that the museum will continue searching for ways to digitize
more of its trove of archives.

Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at
@Iskrynka.