Book monuments in the digital age: Problems of creation and use of electronic resources

The article focuses on creation of electronic resources related to book monuments stored in the institutions of different department affiliation (libraries, archives, and museums). The authors analyse a number of legislative acts under which book monuments must be stored and used and discuss information systems and their specificity to conclude that the presentation of information about book monuments stored in institutions of different affiliation has certain peculiarities and encounter various difficulties. Museums, libraries and archives have different goals in digitisation of book monuments and provide different opportunities for researchers. These institutions must cimply with different standards for filing electronic systems related to book monuments. Thus, nowadays three independent departmental systems provide access to digital copies of book monuments. Libraries traditionally focus on editions ant their content, while museums consider book monuments as museum objects representing material culture. Due to different standards for description of book monuments, readers and researchers encounter a number of challenges in finding information, reliability assessment, collecting information on the same monument in different locations and under different standards. Such projects were successfully realised in the "pre-digital" time, as, for example, in the case with the well-known "Vologda program". This experience can be employed on a new level by regional centres for studying book monuments under the patronage of the Russian State Library. The analysis of their practice confirms the authors' arguments about the need for a common platform for describing book monuments stored in institutions of different affiliations and about the need to improve the existing systems to achieve adequate level of description of such complex book monuments as manuscripts.

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