Digitization as a Pandora's box: research perspectives of online Old Believers' book collections

The article examines the scientific perspectives of development of a digital resource designed to show the specific features of the written culture of the Old Believers in the conditions of the modernization processes of the 19th-20th centuries. The material for the research is the Skit Library - a collection of Cyrillic manuscripts of the late 15th - 20th centuries, given by a living community of the Old Believers to Tomsk State University. The collection includes 144 manuscripts, access to which will be provided in 2017 on the websites of the British Library and TSU Research Library. Preparing bilingual comments to digital copies raised the questions about the harmonization of Russian Standards for the description of manuscripts with the international requirements of Endangered Archives Programme and the list of the supporting information that a researcher needs when working with a historical document on-line. The article highlights three aspects that allow to present the manuscripts of the Skit Library as a single information complex and thereby to solve different objectives productively: studying the transformations of the written culture of the Old Believers in the conditions of in the present-day conditions and presenting unique historical sources to the international academic community. 1. When dating Old Believer manuscripts written on paper without marking signs, it is necessary to take into account both the eschato-logical nature of the Old Believers' faith and the development of a regional infrastructure. For example, stamps on the paper erased by scribes on some manuscripts can be explained by the actualization of apocalyptic fears and increased attention to the visible signs of the "Antichrist's presence" on the Old Believers' confessional products, and the use of office books and postal paper as a writing material -by the history of postal offices and savings banks opened in villages surrounding the taiga skit. 2. Assignment of manuscripts according to their functional purpose and the analysis of copies made by the Skitniks allow us to make an assumption about the hierarchical structure of the Skit Library. The most important texts for the religious community were prayer and ritual texts, followed by works on "true baptism", "heretics and the false teacher", "the end time". These data create conditions for a correct description of the external and internal social and communication links of the community and the text corpus, where the community's liturgical practices and ideas about its own religious mission were forming. 3. Visualization of the binding and restoration techniques used by the Skitniks helps to detail the general statements about the Old Believers' desire to follow the Old Russian tradition of decorating the Christian text and clearly show the ways of preserving it. Thus, the digitization of a particular Old Believer collection ceases to be an end in itself and becomes an instrument for studying the socio-cultural landscape of the Taiga Siberia.

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