Abstract
The purpose of the study – to assess the effectiveness of digital archives as a tool for preserving and studying media materials in Ukraine. The research methodology included an analysis of the legal framework, an assessment of the functioning of three large open digital archives, and an online survey of 500 users. The study revealed major gaps in the legal regulation of digital archives and the lack of uniform standards for their organisation: between 2021 and 2023, the number of digitised documents increased by 63.5% to 8.5 million, and the number of online requests increased by 106.7% to 3.1 million annually. The capacity of digital archives increased by 90% to 285 terabytes. The distribution of media materials shows that textual materials (45%) and photographs (30%) predominate, audio materials account for 15%, video materials for 8%, and interactive media for only 2%. The use of digital archives in education varies from 25% in secondary school to 95% in postgraduate studies, with the COVID-19 pandemic increasing the number of remote users. An analysis of the functionality of the archives showed that 65% of users face navigation problems, and 72% have limited access to full-text versions of documents. Promising areas of technological development include the use of artificial intelligence, which has increased search efficiency by 70%, and blockchain, which has reduced the risk of document forgery by 90%. According to an economic analysis, 35% of the digital archive budget is spent on digitising materials. The study showed that to improve the efficiency of Ukraine’s digital archives, it is necessary to improve the legal framework, introduce unified standards, improve the user interface, and expand the types of media content. The study also revealed the need to strengthen international cooperation and develop a long-term strategy for digital preservation
Keywords
media content; digitisation of documents; archival legislation; information technology; cultural heritage; educational resources
References
[1] Agostinho, D. (2019). Archival encounters: Rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives. Archival Science, 19(2), 141-165. doi: 10.1007/s10502-019-09312-0.
[2] Aske, K., & Giardinetti, M. (2023). (Mis)matching metadata: Improving accessibility in digital visual archives through the EyCon project. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 16(4), article number 76. doi: 10.1145/3594726.
[3] Bharti, S., & Singh, R.K. (2022). Evaluation and analysis of digital language archives development platforms: A parametric approach. The Electronic Library, 40(5), 552-567. doi: 10.1108/EL-01-2022-0011.
[4] Borgman, C.L., Scharnhorst, A., & Golshan, M.S. (2019). Digital data archives as knowledge infrastructures: Mediating data sharing and reuse. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(8), 888-904. doi: 10.1002/asi.24172.
[5] Bozhuk, L. (2021). Internet communications of Ukrainian archives. In I. Tiurmenko (Ed.), Historical and cultural heritage: Preservation, access, use (pp. 61-72). Kyiv: National Aviation University.
[6] Bury, S.J. (2019). Museum libraries and archives in the digital 21st century. In T. Giannini & J. Bowen (Eds.), Museums and digital culture (pp. 483-490). Cham: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-97457-6_24.
[7] Colavizza, G., Blanke, T., Jeurgens, C., & Noordegraaf, J. (2021). Archives and AI: An overview of current debates and future perspectives. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 15(1), article number 4. doi: 10.1145/3479010.
[8] Guidance note of the European Commission on ethics and data protection. (2021). Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/guidance/ethics-and-data-protection_he_en.pdf.
[9] Harris, M., Levene, M., Zhang, D., & Levene, D. (2020). Comparing “parallel passages” in digital archives. Journal of Documentation, 76(1), 271-289. doi: 10.1108/JD-10-2018-0175.
[10] Hawkins, A. (2022). Archives, linked data and the digital humanities: Increasing access to digitised and born-digital archives via the semantic web. Archival Science, 22, 319-344. doi: 10.1007/s10502-021-09381-0.
[11] Hunter, G.S. (2020). Developing and maintaining practical archives. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman.
[12] Kirsch, D.A., Decker, S., Nix, A., Girish Jain, S., & Kuppili Venkata, S. (2023). Using born-digital archives for business history: EMCODIST and the case of e-mail. Management & Organizational History, 18(1), article number 1623. doi: 10.1080/17449359.2023.2183220.
[13] Koolen, M., van Gorp, J., & Van Ossenbruggen, J. (2019). Toward a model for digital tool criticism: Reflection as integrative practice. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34(2), 368-385. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqy048.
[14] Korzhyk, N. (2022). Digital archives of Ukraine: State, problems, prospects. Bulletin of the Book Chamber, 4, 35-39. doi: 10.36273/2076-9555.2022.4(309).35-39.
[15] Kryvushenko, Ya. (2019). Digital technology is an indispensable tool for modern scientific research. Art Research of Ukraine, 19, 137-142. doi: 10.31500/2309-8155.19.2019.185982.
[16] Law of Ukraine No. 2155-VIII “On Electronic Identification and Electronic Trust Services”. (2017, October). Retrieved from https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2155-19#Text.
[17] Law of Ukraine No. 3814-XII “On the National Archival Fond and Archival Institutions”. (1993, December). Retrieved from https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/3814-12#Text.
[18] Law of Ukraine No. 851-IV “On Electronic Documents and Electronic Document Management”. (2003, May). Retrieved from https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/851-15#Text.
[19] Li, D., & Li, L. (2019). Evaluation of open utilization of digital archives information system. In 2019 international conference on precision machining, non-traditional machining and intelligent manufacturing (PNTIM 2019) (pp. 376-379). Xi’an: Atlantis Press. doi: 10.2991/pntim-19.2019.77.
[20] Lorenz, M., & Konečný, M. (2023). Digital archives as research infrastructure of the future. Acta Informatica Pragensia, 12(2), 327-341. doi: 10.18267/j.aip.219.
[21] Moskvyak, Ya. (2023). Digitization as a tool for the preservation of intangible cultural heritage of UNESCO in Ukraine in the conditions of post-war reconstruction. Development Service Industry Management, 4, 21-28. doi: 10.31891/dsim-2023-4(3).
[22] Muhammad-Bello, B.L., Lukman, M., & Salim, M. (2021). A novel approach to news archiving from newswires. In S. Misra & B. Muhammad-Bello (Eds.), Information and communication technology and applications (pp. 546-559). Cham: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-69143-1_42.
[23] Ngoepe, M., Jacobs, L., & Mojapelo, M. (2024). Inclusion of digital records in the archives and records management curricula in a comprehensive open distance e-learning environment. Information Development, 40(2), 190-201. doi: 10.1177/02666669221081812.
[24] Ramalho, J.C., Ferreira, B., Faria, L., & Ferreira, M. (2020). Beyond relational databases: Preserving the data. New Review of Information Networking, 25(2), 107-118. doi: 10.1080/13614576.2021.1919398.
[25] Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 870 “On Approval of the Regulation on the State Archival Service of Ukraine”. (2015, October). Retrieved from https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/870-2015-%D0%BF#Text.
[26] Romein, C.A., Kemman, M., Birkholz, J.M., Baker, J., De Gruijter, M., Meroño-Peñuela, A., Ries, T., Ros, R., & Scagliola, S. (2020). State of the field: Digital history. History, 105(365), 291-312. doi: 10.1111/1468-229X.12969.
[27] Ruest, N., Lin, J., Milligan, I., & Fritz, S. (2020). The archives unleashed project: Technology, process, and community to improve scholarly access to web archives. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE joint conference on digital libraries in 2020 (pp. 157-166). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3383583.3398513.
[28] Serba, M. (2024). Open Ukrainian resources: Access to knowledge in the era of digital transformation. In IX all-Ukrainian scientific student conference “Information technologies and systems in the documentary sphere” (pp. 154-157). Vinnytsia: Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University.
[29] Sliusarenko, N., & Kohanovska, O. (2021). Digital ecosystems in education. Bulletin of the T.H. Shevchenko National University “Chernihiv Colehium”, 170-171(14-15), 37-43.
[30] State Archival Service of Ukraine. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://archives.gov.ua/en/.
[31] Sydorenko, T. (2020). Digitalisation as a reputational tool for libraries. In Culture and information society of the XXI century: Materials of the all-Ukrainian scientific and theoretical conference of young scientists (pp. 175-176). Kharkiv: Kharkiv State Academy of Culture.
[32] Van Hooland, S., & Coeckelbergs, M. (2022). Exploring large-scale digital archives – opportunities and limits to use unsupervised machine learning for the extraction of semantics. In S. Noiret, M. Tebeau & G. Zaagsma (Ed.), Handbook of digital public history (pp. 517-530). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. doi: 10.1515/9783110430295-046.
[33] Voitkov, A. (2023). Information system for long-term storage of digital archives. (Bachelor thesis, Khmelnytskyi National University, Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine).
[34] Zinaman, M. (2024). Social media archiving in practice: A troubled landscape in review. The Serials Librarian, 85(1-4), 40-49. doi: 10.1080/0361526X.2024.2367405.
