Government of the Russian Federation is preparing a bill on mandatory electronic copies for all new publications

State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation Grigory Ivliev said that now the government is reviewing amendments to the federal law “On Mandatory Copy of Documents”. According to the changes, all new publications that go to the libraries will have to be accompanied by mandatory electronic copies. The bill must be approved by the government by February 15, after which it will be sent to the State Duma for consideration. This year, the digitization of the library fund laid 100 million rubles.

Probably the main reason for activization of officials was the famous fire in the library of INION last week, which damaged 15% of the book fund. They also fear that the water could damage the servers that stored 3.5 million digital copies of the documents that they managed to scan. Ivliev says:

Digitization of funds needs to be accelerated. In priority - ancient and ancient manuscripts. We also sympathize with colleagues from the INION library. When allocating funds, we will take into account the situation with this library.

Amendments to the law were adopted in the Ministry of Culture in October 2013, and the government received a document for consideration in February 2014.

The General Director of the Russian State Library (RSL), Alexander Visly, cited the following figures on the financial costs of digitization: scanning a sheet of a modern dissertation costs 2 rubles, while scanning an ancient manuscript with gold ink will cost 50 rubles already, since gold is poorly scanned with a conventional scanner, and need expensive special equipment. Alexander Wisly says:

How many will be able to digitize this year, is not yet known, since the budget of the library has not yet been approved. There are 300 thousand rare books and 500 thousand manuscripts in the RSL, all of which 150 thousand copies were digitized. The fact is that rare editions are not in great demand among readers. Usually they ask modern literature. And digitization is done primarily to ensure its safety. If a book is often ordered, then, so that it does not fray, it needs to be scanned. Digitized versions of these rare books and manuscripts are available in the public domain on our website, since they are no longer protected by copyright. Usually this service is used by scientists from the regions or from abroad who find it difficult to come to Moscow.

Now printing houses are required to send one paper copy of the book to 16 state libraries. The bill plans to reduce this number, demanding to send three electronic copies of a paper publication within a month to the Russian State Library, the Russian National Library and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.