Soviet archives online
Bruce Flanders
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
An exhibition at the Library of Congress Madison Building of approximately
300 secret Soviet documents opened on June 17. The exhibit, "Revelations
from the Russian Archives," was the first public display of materials from
the key working files of Communist officials from the October Revolution
of 1917 to the failed coup of August 1991. As of July 16, the exhibit
traveled to Moscow. The historically-significant documents, photographs
and films were selected by a team of scholars led by Librarian of Congress
James H. Billington, in collaboration with Dr. Rudolph G. Pikhoia,
chairman of the Committee on Archival Affairs of the Russian Federation.
Significantly, portions of 25 of the documents, with translations and
commentary, also are being made available electronically via America
Online, Sovset and the Internet. At a press conference on June 15, Mr.
Billington said, "As far as we know, this will be the first time in
history that an institution has offered both a landmark exhibit and
electronic access to the contents of the exhibit."
Has any reader of PACS-L accessed this exhibit electronically via any
of the three online computer networks listed above? If so, what are
your impressions: was it an effective way to distribute this information;
was any substantial email discussion generated?
Bruce Flanders/Director of Technology/Kansas State Library
FLAN...@UKANVM.Bitnet flan...@ukanvm.cc.ukans.edu
Paul Jones
We have the documents all on line on our
anonymous ftp site--sunsite.unc.edu in a
directory called pub/russia. Each file is
available in Russian (in gif format) and in
the English translation with background
documents associated with each as well. We
picked them up from Library of Congress when
their availability was announced. The archive
was originally on seq1.loc.gov in
pub/soviet.archive. We've found them very
interesting.
Paul Jones
Office for Information Technology
University of North Carolina