არქივის შესახებ

Mark your spot in history — contribute to the Public Archive!

The Public Archive represents a digital archive — a detailed, flexible and interactive mechanism and an open space for any interested individual or organisation. It serves those who consider it their civic duty to preserve and share with the interested public both documentary materials scattered across personal archives and family albums, as well as personal experiences of events, told through oral history.

This is the method that will be used to create a documentary and audio-visual database illustrating our most recent history and helping us to comprehensively understand and thoroughly study the past.

Active participation of each citizen will restore, establish and preserve the trace and “voices” of the numerous people who were left out of the official historiography either intentionally or inadvertently. The participation of each of you will transform the Public Archive into a constantly updated and self-sustained organism.

კონცეფცია

The goal of the Public Archive is to preserve the alternative, unobtained and undeveloped information in danger of being lost, losing which would make impossible a thorough research and understanding of the most recent history; to establish the unique, physically present documentary sources and live memory from each family or personal space; and to present them as a database that is as organised, accessible and flexible as possible.

Therefore the interest of the Public Archive extends over the information covering the full spectrum of the most recent history: from general processes and events of social-political and cultural nature to private information involving family and hereditary chronicles and stories illustrating social arrangement, subsistence and daily life. Any minor, seemingly insignificant fragment of information is merits attention and right to be preserved, as a detail of a mosaic serving to restore the overall picture.

The sources — the basic types of documents — completing the Public Archive are:

  • Photographs.
  • Documents: Memoirs, personal letters, diaries, work papers, notes, etc; graphical sketches or painting works related to specific stories; as well as digital books.
  • Audio materials.
  • Video materials.
  • Artefacts: Material documents related to specific story, event or era; artefacts in public space: memorials, memorial plaques, posters, etc.
ჩაერთე პროცესში

Every interested individual, volunteer, researcher or research organisation can use this space for creating their collection, thus contributing to and developing the overall database, increasing research process and becoming a co-organisers of the Public Archive as a matter of fact. The Public Archive is open for cooperation based on research ethics and parity.

Joining the Public Archive involves transferring digital copies of documents to the ownership of the Public Archive and making them public for research and educational goals.

Following the initial contact from a party interested in joining the Public Archive space a group of researchers from the Archive will digitize materials at their location, according to specific standards, and catalogue detailed information on them. The digitized version, accompanied by the detailed information, will be uploaded to the Public Archive under a collection attribute to the owner-contributor. A copy of the digitized material will also be handed to the owner.

Any user is able to use documents of the Public Archive in their online resolution for research and educational goals, by indicating their source (the archive, preserving organisation, collection, contributor). A registration is necessary for obtaining high resolution versions of the documents.

For informational improvement and development of the Public Archive, as well as for providing feedback, users are able to use the comment function, which involves indication of factual data or information related to a specific document, contributing to the already present information and developing it.

Usage of the Public Archive material is permitted for noncommercial, research and educational goals. Usage of material with commercial aim is prohibited without consent of the relevant contributor, legal owner, their legal descendants, or, in the case of their absence, of the Public Archive. Breach of the terms of usage will result in sanctions of Georgian and international law being activated against the offender.