Virtual reality in favor of science

By Vestnik Kavkaza

The Virtual Reading Room cabinet of the Yeltsin Presidential Library was opened in RSUH. “The students get the opportunity with the opening of the Virtual Reading Room: to work from the start not with the reader, not with some isolated fragments of documents, but with the originals of important documents, which etched the history of our country, and the development of its statehood, and the documents related to the existence and development of the Russian language, the development of regions and territories of the Russian Federation,” Lyudmila Batova, Library Director of RSUH. “There is easy access to the latest scientific literature. You can go to the shelf, you can take a monograph, which was published in recent years, and the latest edition on the various sciences. And the computers that are in this room are our access to global resources. Leading suppliers of resources work with our university - JStor, foreign dissertations, EBSCO. The list is very large. All this is here. This is the perfect base for writing good academic works. And I think that this undertaking, or, say, the tradition of the Presidential Library to open its virtual reading rooms, branches in different parts of the country, in different universities in different libraries - this is a very important and significant event for the development of national identity and for the development of science, and everyone who comes to the library and the university is able to find himself in his history, and just realize himself as an expert and as a professional.”

“In our system of universities that international recognition and world ranking of any university in our world today is, of course, the seriousness and depth of its knowledge base,” Alexander Bezborodov, Vice President for Academic Affairs of Russian State Humanitarian University, head of the Department of Russian history of modern times, thinks. “The more of these sources there will be - the Presidential Library is under the auspices of the power. This will allow having on hand a reliable source of information, and not only historical, but also information that would certainly be useful to sociologists and political scientists in our university. There are Humanities readings currently. Humanities readings are synthesis of science at the different levels. Any information resource and access to it like that, as we are doing through the virtual rooms of the Presidential Library. Is a very important component, the link in the system, working on the general idea of Humanities University.”

“Archival revolution of the 1990s took place just under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Then, en masse, public funds and departmental archives, including those that had been not only unavailable to researchers but also generally unknown, just began to open,” Filipp Taratorkin, Head of Scientific-Educational Center  Humanitarian Archive", reminds. “Another revolution at the end of XX century was the electronic revolution. It was bloodless and positive. In the 1990s, under President Yeltsin, people first began to use the phrase "Electronic Russia", "virtual Russia", "e-government" - then, in the early 1990s, it sounded like something from another planet, like science fiction, scientific or technological utopia. But now this is  a reality, and this reality has a lot of dimensions. One of the dimensions of this reality is fundamentally changing conditions of scientific work, scientific research. A new information environment for scientific research continues to take shape, and the current students and even, perhaps, graduate students can hardly imagine those very different conditions in which research scientists of previous generations worked. We create the Humanitarian Archive of RSUH from scratch. Archives rarely born, they live a long time. In the archive we hold personal funds of our scientists, already deceased or living older comrades and colleagues - their diaries, their notebooks, their letters, their creative materials, large document collections on the history of RSUH. We will create an electronic archive, and that all those documents in the archive of RSUH which are already stored and will be stored will be digitized are presented in the form of electronic images, archival documents, and electronic finding aids will be necessarily presented in electronic form.”