The Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus held a board meeting

On 28 April 2022, the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus held a board meeting to discuss the issues concerning the progress of measures under point 26 “Development of Information Technologies in Archive Business” to meet the instructions of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Belarus following the appointment of the Minister of Justice on October 18, 2021 (subparagraphs 55-58) and on the improvement of the System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds of the Republic of Belarus.

The Board was attended by Deputy Minister of Justice of the Republic of Belarus O. N. Kot.

Regarding the first issue, the Board noted that the work on implementation of the Package of Measures in the 1st quarter 2022 is generally conducted in accordance with the 2022 Sectoral Plan for Development of Information Technologies in Archive Business, approved by the Director of the Department on December 27, 2022.

As part of subparagraph 55 of the Package of Measures “Development of the System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds of the Republic of Belarus in terms of creation of a Virtual Reading Room in order to provide remote access to archival information for researchers”, the Belarusian Research Center for Electronic Records has developed a Statement of Work.

As part of subparagraph 56 of the Package of Measures “Development of the Automated Information System of Audiovisual Documents of the Belarusian State Archives of Films, Photographs and Sound Recordings in terms of continuing work on creating the Digital Archive of Film Documents and placing it on the resources of the national cloud computing platform”, the Belarusian State Archives of Films, Photographs and Sound Recordings has prepared bidding documents for procurement in 2023.

As part of subparagraph 57 of the Package of Measures “Increasing the Rate of Digital Copying of Archival Documents”, the planned indicators increased for the archives of the Brest, Gomel, Grodno, Minsk and Mogilev regions and amounted to 164% of the 2021 indicators.

The State Archives of Brest Region, the State Archives of Gomel Region, the State Archives of Public Organizations of Gomel Region, the State Archives of Grodno Region, the Zonal State Archives in Rechitsa, and the Zonal State Archives in Novogrudok have upgraded their scanning equipment.

The National Archives of the Republic of Belarus is working on the development of the Internet projects “Partisans of Belarus” and “Belarusian Villages Burned during World War II” to fill them and keep the information up to date.

In Q1 2022 the state archival institutions prepared and posted 19 virtual exhibitions as part of the Internet projects.

In January 2022, the Department for Archives and Records Management conducted work to expand the use of archival Internet projects (“Partisans of Belarus”, “Belarusian Villages Burned during World War II”, “Official Heraldic Symbols of the Republic of Belarus”) in educational processes. Based on its results, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus has prepared the Recommendations for the use of Internet projects in the educational process of general secondary education institutions and sent them to the main education departments of regional executive committees and the Education Committee of Minsk City Executive Committee.

The state archival institutions have also been instructed to continue work to popularize and involve archival Internet projects in the educational and training process as part of the “Archives for School” campaign and to ensure the effective use of the scanning equipment.

On the issue of improving the System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds of the Republic of Belarus, the Board noted that the Internet portal performs the task of providing remote access to multi-level archival descriptions and serves as a tool for integrating documentary information resources of state archives.

The System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds is registered in the State Register of Information Resources on July 19, 2019 under No. 0991919345. The owner of the information resource is the Department for Archives and Records Management, the operator and administrator is the Belarusian Research Center for Electronic Records.

As of April 01, 2022, the System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds contains the descriptions of 45 887 fonds (96.5%), 91 557 inventories (97.4%), 12 759 383 storage units (96.3%), 697 672 archival documents.

The main purpose of the System of Open Access to Documents of the National Archival Fonds is to provide users with free access via the Internet to archival descriptions at the level of fonds, series, files and documents in 31 archives, and later to their digital copies.

The creation, maintenance and presentation of this multilevel information retrieval system on the Internet is currently the most promising direction in the development of reference and retrieval tools in the state archives of the country.