About some issues of archaeology in the 21st century on the example of electronic documents or digital copies of documents

Abstract

The article attempts to consider the problems associated with archaeographic publications of electronic documents. If acquisition, storage and use of electronic documents of organizations have deliberately been covered both by legislation and methodical recommendations and have been discussed in many scientific articles, electronic documents of personal origin have been deprived of attention.
The article deals with three types of problems: technical, archaeographic and software. Technical problems are important at the stage of acquisition and description of the foundation of personal origin. The software has an impact on the possibility of archaeographic transmission of the document due to the changes in the structure of the document by different software. For the Word documents, it is primarily the loss of information contained in the edit mode. The article deals with the formats of transmission to the archives of electronic documents – PDF/A, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as some promising developments in this field in other countries, such as the formats of PDF/A-3, PDF/E. The research comes up with the solution of some archaeographic methods of text transmission of electronic documents, primarily of personal origin, including: the transfer of hyperlinks and embedded objects, such as photos, Excel spreadsheets. Virtual exhibitions are suggested to be seen as a type of publication in an electronic environment. Important issues requiring further study and the need to change the “Rules of publication of historical documents in the USSR” are highlighted.