December 10, 2001
Soviet History Getting Digitized

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story on the digitization of Soviet history at http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1206/p12s2-stin.html. A media company based in Fort Worth has signed a contract with officials at the Russian State Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk to digitize Russian films and pictures and make the catalogs available online.

The archive is free and available at http://www.abamedia.com/rao/index.html. There is a TON of stuff here. To start browsing visit the catalogue pages at http://www.russianarchives.com/rao/catalogues/index.html . From here you can search through catalogs of 25,000 Russian-language and 5,000 English-language films (you'll need a Cyrillic-capable browser to be able to search the Russian catalog.) There's also a Russian space film and photo catalog (you'll need Cyrillic again, but you can browse through the photos without having to do a search) and a browsable collection of over 900 photographs having to do with the life of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. (These photographs are not searchable -- they come 20 to the page in thumbnail format; click on the little pictures for larger pictures.)

These catalogues are still works-in-progress, but there's enough material here to make them worth a look.