Russia's first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, signs a copy of his autobiography. Yeltsin, who died in April of this year, will be immortalized in a system of national libraries dedicated to preserving the history of the Russian state. The first branch is due to be constructed in St. Petersburg within the next two years.
Photo: RIA NOVOSTI
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All of Russia to Join Yeltsin's Library
// Branches Will Be in Every Russian Region
Yesterday Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree creating a presidential library in St. Petersburg that will be named after post-Soviet Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin. The president has asked the organizing committee, headed by Presidential Property Managing Department head Vladimir Kozhin, to design a plan for implementing the project by June 20. The State Duma has already offered to allocate 1.6 billion rubles annually in 2007 and 2008 from the budget to finance the project.
According to the decree, the library will have branches in all of Russia's federal regions. The pilot regional branch will be in Tyumen Oblast, whose governor Vladimir Yakushev, along with St. Petersburg Mayor Valentina Matvienko and several presidential plenipotentiaries and federal government officials, is on the organizing committee of the project. The committee also includes the heads of the Russian State Library, the Russian National Library, the Russian State Historical Archives, the History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the film studio Mosfilm.
Vladimir Putin has supported the idea since February of this year, after the idea was first floated by Russian State Historical Archives director Alexander Sokolov. According to Kremlin spokesman Viktor Khrekov, the new library will be dedicated to the history of the Russian state, and its stacks will largely include electronic copies of items in the archives, as well as of documents in other repositories. In addition, President Putin and US President George Bush have already agreed that the new Russian library will participate in the creation of a worldwide digital library, a project that is being spearheaded by the American Library of Congress.
Andrei Shain, the continuous scanning systems management director for the company KROK, believes that the digitalizing of the documents will be a significant expenditure in the creation of the Russian presidential library. "The equipping of the library and the integration of an IT infrastructure will cost around $5-6 million, and the translation of archival documents into electronic form will require the creation of a specialized center, which will cost another $1 million or more. And this isn't taking into account the cost of the human labor needed to digitalize all the documents," he said.
Special Restoration Projects Institute head Vladimir Fomin told Kommersant yesterday that he does not yet know anything about restoration work being commissioned for the Synod building in St. Petersburg, which is supposed to house the library. Experts estimate that the work will cost 1.5-2.5 billion rubles and take around one and a half to two years. Vladimir Kozhin, however, promises that the library will be opened in 2008.
Anna Pushkarskaya (St. Petersburg)
All the Article in Russian as of June 20, 2007
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