12.12.2024
"Preserving the traditionally high level of humanitarian training at the Institute of History and Archives and strengthening its leading position in archival education is a fundamentally important task for all of us," says Sergey Naryshkin.
On December 12, in the House of the Russian Historical Society, as part of the round table "Archive, Science, Education", a discussion was held of the history of archival education, its current state and development directions, and the project "Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy" was announced. The work of the Table began after the opening of the exhibition dedicated to the Institute of History and Archives of RSUH. The exhibition "Nikolskaya, 15: Three Eras in the History of Russian Statehood, Culture, and Education" is dedicated to the legacy and role of the Print Yard. The Exhibition includes "Apostle", the first Russian printed book, arithmetic and grammar textbooks from the 17th-18th centuries, and other archival materials from the largest Russian libraries, reflecting the main stages of the Print Yard's work.
The Institute of Archival Science, later renamed the Institute of History and Archives, was the first specialized higher education institution in the country. The Soviet leadership set the task of providing the archives with qualified personnel. The Institute actively developed concepts and specific methods of source studies and archival science.
Today, professional archivists are tasked to identify, preserve and introduce into academic circulation documents and authentic sources that form knowledge about the past. Chairman of the Russian Historical Society Sergey Naryshkin notes that today, when training future professionals in the specialty of "Document and Archival Studies ", the emphasis lies mainly with narrow-profile, primarily legal, disciplines. He says that it is much more important to form a broad historical outlook in archivists:
"After all, an archivist is, first and foremost, a historian. It is the combination of classical archival research skills and general humanities that has always made graduates of the Institute in demand both in the field of historical science and many related fields".
The development of the project "Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy" together with Moscow Theological Academy was presented by Acting Rector of RSUH Andrei Loginov. Within the framework of this program, it is planned to provide professional training of specialists in Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian and classical languages, Slavic-Cyrillic Greek paleography, church archeology, church archival science, local history and genealogy of the clergy in Russia, calendar and chronological issues, Christian symbolism, emblem studies and other areas of historical and clerical nature:
"If this project is supported by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, then we can begin training specialists, certified church archivists, local historians, who are extremely in demand today in the monasteries and dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church," added the Acting Rector.
The meeting also touched on the topic of digitalization of archival documents using the latest AI methods. According to Andrei Loginov, along with the rapidly changing and developing advanced technologies in the field of text processing, we cannot neglect the use of the potential of our human archival specialists:
"If we completely entrust all this to computers, the result will be very sad. Very serious intellectual work, conceptualization and, indeed, some reflection are needed here."
