About the work on the Project – Digital Memory Storage

The Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine holds more than 70 fonds. Among them are the personal archives of scientists – prominent archaeologists, cultural figures of the XIX-XX centuries. With the Digital Memory Store project, we have begun work on digitizing our collections. In the conditions of quarantine restrictions, when physical access to documents was limited, this task became especially relevant.

The result was a qualitatively scanned, signed in details and presented on a visually attractive web resource documents from the fond of archaeologist Serhii Hamchenko (1860-1932) – a scientist of broad scientific interests with an interesting and complex biography. The creation of the site is timed to the 160th anniversary of the scientist.

Our goal was to take care of one of the oldest fonds of our Archive, while facilitating access to it, making the Archive friendly to a virtual guest – both a narrow specialist and any thoughtful reader.

The grant of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation "Culture in Times of Crisis: Institutional Support" provided financial support to the organization (in this case - the Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archeology of the NAS of Ukraine) for two months (November-December 2020)

In this short period of time, we managed to implement the project at the appropriate level and in an unexpectedly significant amount. Serhii Hamchenko's paper fond has been qualitatively digitized by the "Archival Information Systems" company and transferred to new archive boxes made of Czech acid-free cardboard. Almost the entire fond is described in detail – a database has been created in Excel spreadsheets. A website has been created with an intuitive administrative panel, in which not only the staff of the Archive, but also students-interns, whom we expect in February 2021, will now be able to work remotely in the conditions of lockdown.

We not only implemented the organization's plan until the end of 2020 (as required by the institutional support program), but implemented a full-fledged project, involving 8 employees of the Institute (O. Buzko, V. Mysak, G. Stanitsyna, D. Romanenko, N. Khamayko, V. Rud, I. Sheiko, Y. Khodukina) and Svitlana Lyashko, researcher of S. Hamchenko's biography. On a volunteer basis S. Pavlenko, S. Lysenko, R. Reida, M. Avramenko, V. Pavlova, O. Nezdolii joined us, and about 20 more people working not in the Institute.

The main work lasted a month – from 1 to 30 December 2020 in remote format: on Google Drive, everyone had their own folder, working with digitized documents of the fond in Excel spreadsheet, where they had to fill in "metadata", shredding and detailing existing previously imperfect description of the fond.

Digitized documents were grouped "under researchers". The corresponding colors in the previous description of the fond were the names of researchers who from the beginning agreed to process a certain set of data. Accordingly, on Google Drive, everyone had their own folder, which stored an Excel document with a description, as well as folders with digitized documents. Each folder was named a case number, such as 003_01_0001 (fond number description_number_case number). The file names consisted of four digits 003_01_0001_0001 (fond number_description number_case number_scan number).

The following people were involved in the description of the documents: Halyna Stanitsyna, Daryna Romanenko, Natalia Khamayko, Vitaliy Rud, Svitlana Lyashko, Serhiy Pavlenko, Anna Yanenko, Oleksandr Tarabukin, Pavlo Nechytaylo, Serhiy Lysenko, Roman Reida, Mykyta Ivanov, Maryana Avramenko, Vira Pavlova, Oleksandr Nezdoliy, Oleksandr Bon, Andriy Bardetsky, Volodymyr Golonko, Valery Saenko, Larysa Kochetkova, Olga Hlybina, Oleksandr Buzko, Mykyta Hryshchenko, Lyolya Filimonova, Alyona Hnatyuk. Also working on the project were: Oleksandra Buzko, Volodymyr Mysak, Iryna Sheiko, Yulia Khodukina, Oleksandr Malyshev, Iryna Pelypenko, Oksana Davydenko, Vitaliy Zhygola, Anna Levytska, Anna Baranova. Advised by: Iryna Hlik, Svitlana Starovoit, Oleksiy Komar, Viktor Kosakivsky, Volodymyr Kolybenko, Artem Borysov, Vladislav Berkovsky, Serhiy Telizhenko, Denys Vetrov.

Work with programmer Volodymyr Mysak began in parallel. As a result, the website www.hamchenko.archive.iananu.com was created, which presents a considerable list of categories (as of today, 42 categories have been identified). Relevant scanned copies of individual cases with detailed signatures are drawn up in each of the categories.The website was hosted on the web server of the hosting companyUKRINDEX (https://www.ukrindex.com/). From December 2023 the site has been removed to the web server of the AWS hosting. The site of the fond is a subdomain (subdomain of level 3) to the main domain. Website address //hamchenko.archive.iananu.com/ The site is based on an open-source content management system WordPress. This system is written in PHP 7.4 and uses MySQL 5.6.39 for data storage.

The site consists of client (frontend) and administrative (backend) parts. The user of the website can be anyone who has technicalopportunities to access the Internet. The frontend was created using a professional theme for WordPress Bold Photography Pro by CATCH THEMES, including a thematically selected functional part. The layout is adaptive for all types of devices (PCs, tablets, mobile phones). About 30 plugins and widgets are used, among them: different types of galleries and sliders, bilingualism (Ukrainian and English versions), structure of categories and cases, security plugins. More than 30 GB of photos and videos are uploaded to the site, which are grouped into 42 categories and 500 key objects. Moderators of different levels of access have the opportunity to create and edit site content.

As the volume of documents turned out to be significant (actually the entire fond is described: 229 cases, about 20,000 scans), it was decided to publish the documents on the site in parts.

As of December 24, 2020, the biographical block "About Hamchenko", a large array of documents on the scientist's work (work in VUAK, etc.), the category "Kyiv. Trubetskyi’s estate", "Еру Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (The DniproHES) archaeological expedition", partly the category "Epistolary Heritage" "(Letters of the 1920s, thematically related to other published categories).

It is planned to upload the following blocks to the site:

• "Eneolithic (Trypillia)" (+ documents of Ipolyt Zborovsky + correspondence with him);

• "Eastern Volhynia" (+ documents about the Volyn Research Museum);

• Research in other regions of Ukraine (+ relevant thematic correspondence);

• Early period of S. Hamchenko (study of the Gulf of Finland + correspondence with the Imperial Archaeological Commission + collection of clippings from newspapers and magazines for 1903-1913).

The Archive expresses its sincere gratitude to all those involved in the work on the project.

Special thanks to the Directorate of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine: V.P. Chabai, А.V. Buyskykh, O.V. Manigda.

We are grateful for the assistance of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

As a gift for all participants of the project, a souvenir calendar with photos from the Serhii Hamchenko’s Fond was printed, which can be downloaded in high resolution here.