About the work on the Project

About the work on the Project "Digital Memory Storage. Archive of Viktor Petrov (Domontovych)"

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

The Ukrainian Cultural Foundation's grant ‘Restoration of cultural and artistic activities’ (Lot No 2 ‘Short-term cultural and artistic projects’) provided financial support for the project of the Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine ‘Digital Memory Storage. The Archive of Viktor Petrov (Domontovych).

The project lasted for two months (August-September 2024), and in this short period of time we managed to implement it at the proper level and in a significant amount. More than 32,000 scans of documents from the Viktor Petrov (Domontovych) paper collection were made.

Collection's documents were transferred to new archival boxes.

The part of the fund's scanned documents, which is displayed on the website, has been described in detail by a team of specialists - an annotated description has been created in Excel tables.

The part of the foundation's scanned documents that are available on the website has been described in detail by a team of specialists, who have created a database in Excel spreadsheets.

Candidates of historical sciences Valentina Korpusova, Nataliya Abashina, Oleg Petrauskas and Viktoriya Sergienko were involved in describing cases and writing annotations. On a volunteer basis, Yuliya Karpets, a graduate student from the Department of Literary Studies of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and Tamara Kutsaieva, candidate of historical sciences, joined the project.

Also Dr Vytautas Rinkevičius, Lithuanian linguist, Balticist, Associate Professor of Baltic Studies at the Institute of Baltic Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University. Vytautas helped to understand the grammar of the (Old) Prussian language and wrote an annotation to this chapter. Sophia Shevchenko, Kristina Dudar, Vladyslava Mykhaylyk, Olga Babinets, and Oleksandra Kharchenko, 1st-year students of the Faculty of History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, helped to preliminarily analyze the materials for Prussian language grammar as a part of their archival practice.

Additional annotations for individual categories were written by Oleksandra Buzko, Yaroslav Volodarts-Urbanovych and Halyna Stanytsyna. Archivists Daryna Romanenko and Olha Kovalchuk and student Oleksandr Buzko assisted the project. Vira Pavlova, Anzhelika Kolesnychenko, Serhiy Pavlenko, Vitaly Kozyuba, Yuriy Boltryk, Olena Fialko, Anna-Maria Kucherenko, Olha Martyniuk, Svitlana Zinovieva, Olena Dzneladze, Yulia Khodukina and Iryna Pelypenko contributed with advice and consultations.

Andrii Portnov, Professor of Ukrainian History at the European University of Viadrina, Director of the Centre for Polish and Ukrainian Studies helped with communication and promotion of the project.

The main work lasted for a month, from 1 to 30 August 2024, in a remote format: all project participants had their own folder on Google Drive, where they worked with the digitalised documents of the foundation in an Excel spreadsheet, filling in the data, detailing on the old imperfect description of the foundation.

Thus, during the project, the existing description of the paper collection, the description of negatives on glass was improved. And a separate description of Viktor Petrov's correspondence were created.

All materials are presented on the website in two languages - Ukrainian and English.

WORK ON WEBSITE CONTENT

The website is based on the open source content management system WordPress and is hosted by AWS. The Foundation's website is a subdomain (3rd level subdomain) to the main domain. Website address: https://petrov-domontovych.archive.iananu.com/

This is already the third similar site of the archival initiative "Digital Storage of Memory". The first was dedicated to archaeologist Serhii Hamchenko (https://hamchenko.archive.iananu.com), the second to ethnographer, anthropologist, archaeologist and public figure Hvedir Vovk (http://vovk.archive.iananu.com). First two projects were implemented by programmer Volodymyr Mysak. Now Volodymyr is serving in the army, so he was replaced by Maksym Bakaev. However, Volodymyr also helped the project, as well as Ihor Mysak and Oleksandr Tansky.

Sites are united by a website-card https://archive.iananu.com/ (web developer Diego Thon, artwork by Iryna Glik).

The client part of the site (frontend) was created using the professional theme for WordPress Bold Photography Pro from the CATCH THEMES group, including the thematically selected functional part. The layout is adaptive for all types of devices (PC, tablets, mobile phones). About 30 plugins and widgets are used, among them: different types of galleries and sliders, bilingualism (Ukrainian and English version), structure of categories and cases, security plugins. More than 3 GB of photo materials are uploaded to the site, which are grouped into 19 categories and more than 70 key objects. Moderators of different access levels have the ability to create and edit site content.

CATEGORIES OF DOCUMENTS PRESENTED ON THE WEBSITE

As of 30 September 2024, already published on the website:

Biographical block ‘About Viktor Petrov (Domontovych)’ with the categories:

  • ‘Biographical documents’,
  • ‘Portraits and other photographs’,
  • ‘Dissertation defence case’.

Archaeological block with categories:

  • “Urnfields”,
  • “Excavations of the Kosaniv grave field”,
  • “Ceramics and ceramic production”,
  • “Negatives on glass”,
  • “Tyras and unknown photos of Viktor Petrov”,
  • “Researches of Kyiv”.

Block "History, folklore and linguistics" with categories:

  • "Feudalism in Kyivan Rus",
  • "Folklore",
  • "Old Prussian Grammar",
  • "The peoples colonised by Russia".

‘Literature studies and literature’ block with categories:

  • ‘Research on Panteleimon Kulish’,
  • “Research on Hohol” and 'The Girl with a Teddy Bear'"
  • “Literary fragments about Shchors”.

‘Epistolary heritage’ block with categories:

  • ‘Letters from Oleksandr Bodiansky’,
  •  “Letters from female fellow archivists Nadiia Linka and Seraphima Kuznetsova”,
  •  “Letters from Fedot Filin”.

CREDITS

The Scientific Archive expresses its sincere gratitude to everyone involved in the project.

Special thanks to the Academic Council of the Institute of Archeology of the NASU: Viktor Chabai, Alla Buiskykh, and Serhii Telizhenko.

We are grateful for the support from the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

As a gift, a souvenir calendar with photos from the Kosanove collection, burial site of the Cherniakhiv culture that was explored in the 1960s by Viktor Petrov and Nadiia Kravchenko, was printed for all project participants. The collection is now kept in the Scientific Funds of the Institute of Archaeology of the NASU. The calendar can be downloaded here.

The calendar, as well as this page and the main page of the website is based on photographs by Nika Havrysh.

With humble gratitude to the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the opportunity to live and work in Ukraine !