Digitization of Russian Parish Registers of the 18-20th Centuries as the Contribution to the Cultural Foundation of Historical Documents

The article specifies the problem of replenishing the cultural heritage through the creation of a special class of digital collection of archival documents - Russian parish registers. The original documents are the monuments of book culture. Their peculiarity is that individual acts of church records are sewn in the books with a thick spine. The dilapidated state of the media requires careful handling; unbinding documents for scanning is highly undesirable. Market researches showed that there is no scanning equipment for books with big thick spine without unbinding. The article has described the experience of the development of dual-chamber projection scanner with a special cradle providing the high-quality, fast-scan of parish registers with an opening angle of the document of 90-180°, thickness up to 1,000 mm and weight up to 30 kg. The absence of geometric distortion of the scanned page is ensured due to design features. The system provides each page as a separate file. The data format allows computer processing of images with the ability to recognize text. The practical application of the system was carried out as exemplified by parish registers of Yekaterinburg diocese of the 18-20th centuries. In all, 830 books were scanned, totaling to 136,786 pages. Digitalization quality was assessed by sampling parameters: the text legibility, the absence of geometric distortion, the color quality, the uniformity of quality scanning of documents within a book, etc., it was checked by experts and historians of Yekaterinburg Patriarchate and was found as high. The scan results are presented in the form of an information system with the ability to view digitized documents, to search within catalog and to search by date case, key concepts, names of the fund and descriptions. The value of the work lies in the introduction of inaccessible documents to the cultural space and opening the possibility of a new class digitization of archival materials. The system development is aimed at broadening the base of digitizable objects of material culture and the development of software to improve the quality of digital images, the empowerment of image recognition and search capabilities.