Sofia Vladimirovna Ilina, an outstanding specialist in the field of linguistic and information support of Automated Library and Information Systems (ABIS), is celebrating her anniversary today.
Sofia Vladimirovna was born in the city of Arkhangelsk of the Russian Federation in a family of employees. The girl graduated from the Zavolzhje secondary school in the Gorki region (now Nizhni Novgorod region) in 1966 and entered the Gorki State University named after N.E. Lobachevsky, majoring in applied linguistics with a specialization in scientific and technical information.
After graduating from the university in 1971, Sofia was sent to the Belarusian Research Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (NTI) and Technical and Economic Research of the State Planning Committee of the BSSR, where she had worked fruitfully for twenty years as a junior researcher before being promoted to senior researcher.
S.V. Ilina decided to deepen her scientific research and entered graduate school in the specialty "Structural, Applied and Mathematical Linguistics" in 1978. Having successfully defended her dissertation on the development of an information search language for documentation systems, in 1988 she received the degree of Candidate of Philological Sciences.
Sofia Vladimirovna has been working in the Belarusian branch of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Information and Technical and Economic Research of the Agro-Industrial Complex (APC) as a senior researcher since 1991. As the result of the institution’s closure, Sofia Vladimirovna joined the Belarusian Research Institute of Economics and Information of the Agro-Industrial Complex as a leading researcher three years later.
The active integration of new information technology into the operations of libraries in the republic started in the latter half of the 1980s. The V.I. Lenin State Library of the BSSR (now the National Library of Belarus) was one of the first in the country to introduce ABIS.
The significance of Sofia Vladimirovna's individual contribution to the electronicization of the Belarusian library sector cannot be overstated. Even today, the entire professional community actively uses its fundamental developments.
S.V. Ilina's career at the National Library of Belarus began in March 1994, when she was hired as a software engineer in the Department of Library Process Automation on a part-time basis. The Library Technology Development sector was established under the department in 2003, and the department of the same name was formed a year later, in which Sofia Vladimirovna had worked until 2014, developing and improving technological support for all areas of library activity.
While working at the main library of the country, she worked with excellent knowledge in the development of information and linguistic support for information systems, including ABIS. Under the leadership of Sofia Vladimirovna, formats for presenting bibliographic and authoritative records (BELMARC) were created, a technology for creating and maintaining a national database of authoritative records was developed, as well as instructions for semantic processing of documents in the library, for information search in the electronic catalog in the ASPID environment, and for maintaining the library's linguistic support tools.
S.V. Ilina successfully combined her work in the library with teaching at the Faculty of Information and Document Communications of the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts. She has been imparting her priceless knowledge and experience to individuals who are just beginning to take the initial steps in the speciality during ten years since 1996. She was awarded the title of Associate Professor in the specialty "Computer Science, Management and Computer engineering" in 2001.
Sofia Vladimirovna is the author of numerous materials on linguistic and information support of automated systems of NTI and ABIS.
In 1983, the instruction developed by her for performing the technological operation "Compiling a bibliographic record" was published, which contains the rules for compiling a bibliographic record for NTI documents and entering it into the NTI document forms. In 2012, the training aid "Authoritative/normative databases in ABIS" was published under the authorship of Sofia Vladimirovna. Designed for students of the library faculty, it has become a reference book for many experienced professionals in the library industry. The publication covers theoretical issues of the structure and content of records of authoritative/normative databases, contains methods and auxiliary materials for creating authoritative/normative records for the names of the most frequently normalized types of objects.
Sofia Vladimirovna shared her experience with like-minded colleagues at professional events of various levels, actively covered the details of her developments on the pages of the professional press. In her speeches and publications, she touched upon the problems of the process of cataloging various types of documents in the BELMARC format, noted its role in the formation of the consolidated catalog of libraries in Belarus, considered the prospects for creating and using national databases of authoritative records in the country's libraries, raised issues related to the linguistic support of ABIS, and much more.
S. V. Ilyina's professionalism was repeatedly awarded with various awards: certificates of honor from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth Union (1987), and the bronze medal of the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy of the USSR (1980).
Employees who were lucky enough to work with Sofia Vladimirovna speak of her as a purposeful, competent and highly erudite specialist who has comprehensive information about all the technological processes in the library, characterize her as an optimistic, kind and sympathetic person with an active life position.
From the entire staff of the National Library of Belarus, we extend our most sincere congratulations to Sofia Vladimirovna on this significant day! Wish you good health for many years to come, harmony in your soul, tireless energy and strength! Let your eyes glow with happiness, life will be full of pleasant surprises and bright emotions, and there will always be those who will surround you with warmth, the most sincere love and care!
The material was prepared by Irina Kuketa, Chief Librarian of the Library Science Research Department.
Read about veterans and employees of the National Library of Belarus in the section "Portraits: the history of the library in faces".
