Head of the State Archival Service of Ukraine Anatoliy Khromov states that today in Ukraine, a maximum of 5% of archival documents have been digitized.
“In archival terms, we are one of the largest countries in Europe. We have 86 million storage units only, most often these are cases on paper, which, according to the regulations, can contain up to 250 sheets, that is, billions of copies,” Khromov said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
According to him, the pace of digitization in previous periods, unfortunately, was quite low, but now the agency has achieved that last year the pace of digitization increased by 500%.
“But even this is quite small, because earlier the pace was such that it would take thousands of years to fully digitize. Therefore, I am not ready to say for sure, but as of now, a maximum of 5% of documents have been digitized,” the head of the Archive said.
Khromov said that the agency is trying to attract international partners, because there is no state digitization program and has never existed.
“We planned that together with our partners we could digitize all key documents of interest to people in the future for seven-ten years: metric records, books of civil registration offices, population censuses. It would be quite real. And now, even despite the war, we are signing such agreements because we believe that as soon as it becomes safe in the region, we can continue these digital projects,” he concluded.
As reported, in May, Ukrainian State Archival Service presented an interarchive search portal, which allows access through a single window to digital archive resources. At the moment, the digital resources of three central state archives of Ukraine are presented on the platform, together they are almost 1.5 million full-text scanned copies of archival documents, to which a full-fledged search engine has been created. In particular, we are talking about the Central State Archive of the Supreme Authorities and Administration of Ukraine, the Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine, the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine.
