Publications of Archival Material In The Digital Age: Options, Facilities, and Quality Control

The paper is providing the characteristics of the existing rules and traditions of publication of archival documents and other written sources in Russia, which set criteria for quality evaluation of any scientific publication. These criteria and principles were laid down more than 30 years ago, and technics and technologies made much progress since then. The new conditions don’t change main principles, but give more freedom and provides choice in methods and approaches applied according to the main purpose of publication of archival documents. Besides, they imply the emergence of new additional requirements. Nowadays, digital technologies are widely used in the process of preparation of traditional paper based publications. At the same time, electronic publications are becoming more and more popular. The author proposes to classify these publications into several groups, or categories, depending on the aims they declare to pursue. Each of groups has its specific features. In these classification special attention is paid to so called “scientific” or “archaeographic” publications. Their presentation in digital environment requires, from one part, observation of classical rules of their thorough and detailed archival description, historical and archaeographic annotations, with elements of philological and linguistic analyses, well founded choice and systematization of materials presented, scrupulousness text transmission, and so on. From another part, publication of digital copies of archival documents requires closer attention to the description of this digital object as itself and its correspondence with the original source.