INCS - Vol. X - The International Newsletter of Communist Studies ...

12 The International Newsletter of Communist Studies
From then on, two more years were necessary to develop and test the methodology, train
the staff and install the equipment. These activities were carried through under the
authority of Dr. Kirill Anderson, Director of the Russian State Archives for Social and
Political History (RGASPI), in permanent contact with the Informatica El Corte Inglés
Company, owner of the software and the International Project Committee chaired by
Academician Alexandre Chubarian. The implementation of the Project, i.e. the building
up of the database that gives access to ca. 230.000 files and the digitisation of some sixty
sub-series totalling more than one million pages the readers may view on screen, took
four and a half years. The seed money granted by Council of Europe proved to be a
profitable investment. The Swiss Federal Archives, followed by the Federal Archives of
Germany, the Direction des Archives de France and the Spanish Ministry for Education and
Culture decided to contribute to the funding of the Project already before the conclusion
of the Framework Agreement. Then have joined the Project the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C., Open Society Archives, Budapest, the General Directorate of the Italian
State Archives and the National Archives of Sweden. Dr. Klaus Oldenhage, Vice-President
of the Federal Archives of Germany has managed the million and half euros granted by the
eight Partners for funding the Project with the rigour and austerity that had
characterised, in former times, the puritan patricians.
Library of Congress offered a substantial addition to the database. Under the supervision
of Dr. John Earl Haynes, some 200.000 personal names were transliterated from Cyrillic to
Latin script (whenever necessary, by restoring the original spelling) and all the descriptors
were translated from Russian into English. The reading room of RGASPI in Moscow was
inaugurated last summer. The database and the digitised images are also accessible, as of
now, in the reading rooms of the eight Partner Organisations. A Dutch and a Russian
Company, IDC , Leiden and Elar, Moscow are finalising now the plan for making the
database and the images available online. Thanks to Council of Europe, thanks to the new
archival policy conducted since 1992, by Prof. Rudolf Pihoia, Vladimir Tiuneev and
Vladimir Kozlov, successively, thanks also to a highly efficient network of archival and
technical cooperation, extending from Moscow to Washington, through Bern, Budapest,
Koblenz, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg and Stockholm, the quest for historical truth
received a splendid tool.
INCOMKA Presentation at the International Congress on Archives
During the XVth International Congress on Archives (Vienna, Austria) in the Vienna
Congress Center on Thursday, August 26 at 11.45 AM in the hall E1 is taking place the
presentation of the electronic version of the KOMINTERN Archives. This action in the form
of “avant garde session” is initiated by the Federal Archives Service of Russia with the
purpose to acquaint the international archival society with the results of this cooperative
project, which is considered by right as one of the biggest projects of such kind
throughout the whole history of the International Council on Archives. Working languages –
English and Russian with the simultaneous translation into English, French, German and
Russian.
Directory of Publications about INCOMKA and Press File on CD-ROM
A 750 pages Directory of Publications about INCOMKA together with a Press File will be out
on August 2004. The Computerization of the Archives of the Communist International and
The Activities of the International Committee for the Computerization of the Komintern
Archives (INCOMKA) 1992-2004. An International Cooperative Project carried out under the
auspices of the Council of Europe by the Federal Archives Service of Russia and the
International Council on Archives" containing presentations, publications, press clippings
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