Book heritage of Belarus became available in global information space in the Year of Culture before 500th anniversary of Belarusian book printing celebrations.
The online project “Book of Belarus of the 14–18th centuries” was launched in the National Library of Belarus, it includes documents with historical values for Belarus and global community.
The electronic resource contains copies of full texts of editions of the National Library of Belarus, published in Belarus in the 14–18th centuries and according to territory, language, author or content refer to Belarus. It has old-printed books of Cyrillic printing, editions in Polish, Latin, and other languages.
The project will be interesting to researchers in bibliography, history, pedagogics, employees of libraries, archives, museums and those interested in Belarusian history and culture.
Every book has a description, which includes information about an author, place, year, language, subject area of the document, and information about physical characteristics of an edition.
For users’ convenience there’s a shelf code of the original of the National Library of Belarus, which can be used to order a document and work with it in the Library.
Exhibitions presented in the project allow to get acquainted with most significant in historical aspect collections of documents. For example, it’s possible to look at full texts of Francysk Skaryna’s editions in the funds of the Library.
The resource has a map with correspondent geographical objects for convenience.
Besides, the resource offers a multi-aspect search of necessary documents by name, author, creator, place of publishing, subject, etc.
“Book of Belarus of the 14–18th centuries” has been recently available online – since October, 2016. For this short period it was checked out by Belarusians, British, Germans, Lithuanians, Polish, Russians, Ukrainians and others, which is an attribute of interest to Belarusian culture worldwide.
The project is constantly developing. In future, copies of documents from funds of other libraries, including foreign, so that the resource could represent book heritage of Belarus in the global Web in a full scale.
It’s symbolic, that this significant event along with other bright events took place in the Year of culture – Belarusian book culture became available in global information space.
