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Recollection of long-standing contacts with Alena Pazderová, archivist at the National Archives
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Laudatio to Alena Pazderová, archivist at the National Archives in Prague
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The process of ennoblement started by filing a supplica addressed to the emperor and processed by Bohemian Court Chancellery. The proceedings included a censorship of coats of arms-to-be. This was originally the duty of one of the officers of the Chancellery, but since the beginning of the 18th century, there was an especially appointed „Inspector of the arms“. The inspector made sure that the armorial achievements were according to the rules of heraldry. If there was a problem with the suggested achievement, the amendments could have been made by either changing the tinctures, correcting the charges or changing them. The colored pictures of armorial achievements are nowadays part of almost half of the cases of the Bohemian Court Chancellery. They are painted on smaller papers attached by small dots of red wax on the fourth or fifth page of the case, near the blason. In some cases, where these colored pictures were already missing when the cases were still part of the Chancellery archives, they are replaced by an ink-only drawing with just the letters replacing the colors.The most common variant is a quartered field, party per cross (or even with inescutcheon), the most popular charges are lions, eagles and griffins, ordinaries on the other hand are quite rare. The helms are almost always barred helms, no matter the exact rank of the supplicant. Torses are very rare, usually replaced by crest-coronets and in one case by a turban. The mantling is usually per pale both on the inside and outside, mostly red-gold and blue-silver, disregarding the colors of the shield.The crests usually repeat the charges of the escutcheon, but the most traditional ones like wings, horns and panaches of feathers were used as well.Unfortunately, cases where the documents mention anything about the reasons the armiger had for choosing the charges, are extremely rare and the only cases where we can be sure, are the canting arms.
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The article for an almanac published for the jubilee of Alena Pazderová pursued the formation of the fonds of Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, today constituting the first collection of the complex fonds of the Family Archives of the Tuscany Habsburgs that comprises sixty-one volumes of various types of documents from 1740–1790. After the separation of documents in 1859–1860, Leopold’s reports and manuscripts were placed in Villa Montughi in Florence, Tuscany. The study identified the individual volumes and monitored their complex journey, especially the individual stages of their long-lasting transport over nearly one century from Tuscany via Salzburg to Bohemia and their eventual placement in the Prague National Archives depository in 1996. Furthermore, the study describes an interest of the Italian party to surrender the Tuscany family archives to Italy; it ended by concluding a cultural agreement that enabled a mutual exchange of archivists, the study of the Family Archives of the Tuscany Habsburgs (RAT), and provided Czech researchers with a list of Bohemica documents in which Dr Alena Pazderová played a significant role.
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The article analyses the network of private documents (so-called egodocuments) characteristic of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, a substantial part of which is in the Family Archives of the Tuscany Habsburgs in the National Archives in Prague. The network was a miscellany of diaries, journals, ‘travel journals’, notebooks, and folders with loose sheets containing notes, jottings, accounts, reflections, and testimonies of a personal and family nature as well as political and governmental issues. These documents formed an effective system of personal memory organisation that culminated with a long and varied text known as Il Governo di famiglia in Toscana (The Family Rule in Tuscany) which is Leopold’s autobiography of a kind. A brief reconstruction of the text’s complex preparation, as well as the events that followed the death of Leopold II, points out the confines of the publication written by Franz Pesendorfer several decades ago. The chapter about the judicial reform, missed out in the publication, gives a chance to verify some of Leopold’s ideas and intentions.
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Introductory text on the 80th anniversary of the death of archivist Bedřich Jenšovský
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A prominent figure in Bohemian archival science, PhDr Bedřich Jenšovský (24 September 1889 – 12 February 1942) was an archivist, Director of the Czech Lands Archives, teacher, secretary, and also briefly Director of the State School for Archivists. He was admitted to the Czech Lands Archives on 1 October 1908 as a copier of archival documents and remained faithful to the institution until his violent death. The volume of his work was enormous; over time, he participated in the archives’ organisational issues as well as leadership. In 1916 he was appointed the head of the archives branch in Bredovská Street, frequently deputised the director at meetings during the construction of the new building, and organised the moving of the archives between 1930 and 1933. His appointment as the Czech Lands Archives head administrator on 1 July 1933, immediately after the retirement of his predecessor J.B. Novák, and as director on 1 January 1934 marked the pinnacle of his career.Jenšovský was the first director to work at full capacity, along with his team, in the new archives building in Belcredi Street (today M. Horákové 5/133) in Prague 6. He was at his prime with creative and professional interests exceeding the scope of ordinary archival work; he was devoted to archival education and ranked among the best connoisseurs of printed Bohemica in Roman archives. He was present at the beginning of the stand-alone Czechoslovak Historical Institute in Rome and, in some periods, was one of its chief representatives. Moreover, he was a member of other professional organisations. The arduous years of the German occupation entailed very difficult work conditions for the Czech Lands Archives’ employees, including enforced German administration, forced extradition of archival materials, and irrecoverable personal losses. B. Jenšovský was one of the six employees who died because of the violent Nazi regime during 1939–1945. The Gestapo arrested him at the archives on 8 October 1941 as part of the ‘Sokol Action’, launched against the Sokol Movement representatives, and he died on 12 February 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
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Based on the travel reports of Dr Bedřich Jenšovský, providing a vivid testimony of his daily work in Rome, yet to be fully used, the study charts his five sojourns to Rome from the eve of the First World War to the 1920s and 1930s. Jenšovský is not only presented as a prominent researcher and connoisseur of the Vatican Apostolic Archives, Vatican Apostolic Library, and other Italian archives and libraries but also as an experienced editor and author of the third volume of the series Monumenta Vaticana res gestas bohemicas illustrantia. Moreover, he was an assiduous heuristic and editorial contributor to other volumes in the series (Tomus prodromus, vols. VI and VIII) that later editors successfully continued. His research of Bohemica in Italian and Vatican libraries was of no less import; his study about the Barberini Library laid foundations for their scientific analyses. His heuristic works on the research of the nunciature at the imperial court in the late 16th and the first quarter of the 17th centuries were equally significant and serve current editors of the nunciature editions. The enormous diligence, systematic character, and dutifulness of Jenšovský’s research are further evidenced by a wide array of remaining copies of the Vatican and Italian documents in the National Archives, today also used as erudite sources for historians and researchers of the Middle Ages and early modern times. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jenšovský mingled with the masterminds of the newly established Czechoslovak Historical Institute in Rome that he chaired during his sojourns there and he worked at full capacity on its organisation, scientific tasks, and international presentation, often with the assistance of the Czechoslovak ambassadors to Italy and the Vatican. It was also thanks to his initiatives that the institute could boast about successful collaboration with foreign historical institutes accredited in Rome (especially the Austrian, German, Romanian, and the Görres Society) as well as with Italian institutes (Istituto per l’Europa Orientale, Assoziatione per gli studi mediterranei, Annales Institutorum, Istituto di Studi Romani), by participating in their conferences and sessions. Furthermore, Jenšovský paid great attention to the proper operation of the Czechoslovak Historical Institute in Rome, both the organisational and administrative aspects, as documented by his efforts to develop the institute’s status, care for its registry, whose plan he drew up in 1930, and he also put extended efforts into the cataloguing and continuous re-stacking of the institute’s library. His great, though unfulfilled dream was the establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy in Rome. Fortunately, he did not live to see the sad end of the Czechoslovak Historical Institute in Rome, to whose administration he devoted such a great deal of effort. Nonetheless, his legacy continues in the newly established Czech Historical Institute in Rome that actually has implemented many of Jenšovský’s ideas that were on a waiting list for more than half a century.
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The article presents Dr Bedřich Jenšovský’s activities in the State School for Archivists, a specialised educational institute that was founded in 1919, after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic. An archivist with the Czech Lands Archives, Bedřich Jenšovský was not present at the start of the school, but he taught there from nearly the very beginning; first the history of administration and archival science from 1926 forward. He basically taught these two subjects till the end of his engagement at the school. In the early 1930s, as a member of the Czechoslovak Archives Association, he co-designed the school’s curriculum reform that became effective from 1934. In addition to his educational role, Bedřich Jenšovský was also the school’s secretary. In the second half of the 1930s, he fully represented the headmaster, Professor Gustav Friedrich, and he was appointed director in 1940, despite the difficult situation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. For many years, Bedřich Jenšovský was also editor and contributor of the School for Archivists’ Periodical, strongly influencing its form and development, and he is also credited for the school’s development and operation in propitious and unpropitious times.
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Selected bibliography of the archivist and historian Bedřich Jenšovský
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Programme study on Czech historical research in Rome and the tasks of the Czechoslovak Historical Institute in Rome.
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In the past, more Czech aristocratic families took care of their family and estate by keeping archives. In our country, the Tuscan grand dukes also devoted the increased care of documents, books and records. At the beginning of 19th century, they owned 9 demesnes in Bohemia. For that reason, they employed responsible archivists, the most important of whom was Moritz Tietz (1796 – 1883), a native of Saxon Dresden. Besides other activities, Tietz devoted himself to the grand duchy records office and archives from the year 1826 until his retirement in 1879. When the Tuscan Hapsburgs gave their Czech domains to Austrian rulers, Tietz and most of other officials went over to imperial service. Not only did he create record charts for grand duchy and imperial documents, he also made more than 120 recording aids to official records and systematically arranged the whole vast archives of administration of the Tuscan estates. He also had to receive books and records from the individual demesnes, to be archived and registered. Moritz Tietz and Josef Horner officially held the title of grand duchy or imperial archivists, their successors were called registrars. The fruitful life of Moritz Tietz came to an end in Prague Lesser Town on 5th June 1883.
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Creating bibliographies (from the 17th century to modern times) is a way of describing books and other types of publications and classifying them according to certain standards, with the aim of providing sufficient information about a certain work. Since the end of the Second World War, with the increase in the number of publications on the territory of the newly formed state, there was a need to create a unique database of bibliographies of publications, in order to provide users with insight into the entire publishing activity of Yugoslavia. This work continued even after the independence of the Republic of Serbia, in the National Library of Serbia (NLS). In addition to creating bibliographies of monographic and serial publications, the NLS also creates bibliographies of articles and content from professional journals. The Department of Serial Publications, more precisely the Subject Analysis Subdepartment, is in charge of this work as a separate organizational unit. Within this department, in addition to the creation of bibliographies, bibliographies of articles from proceedings, CIP of articles (professional classification of articles from serial publications of articles), revision of the library collection, and translation of UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) tables are carried out.
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Bridge or Island? Interview with Mária Lupescu Makó, historian in Cluj-Napoca (by Beatrix F. Romhányi).
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The purpose of the article is to substantiate the relevance, prerequisites and methodological foundations for creating an electronic library of scientific and technical information in the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine (SSTL). The research methodology is based on a combination of general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis and forecasting, as well as on the use of systemic, informational, structural and functional, comparative, and terminological approaches. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the further development of views on the creation and functioning of an electronic scientific and technical library in the context of the implementation of the principles of open science and open access to scientific and informational resources. Conclusions. The development and implementation of the project on the creation of an electronic scientific and technical information library in the SSTL of Ukraine will contribute to solving a number of important issues, in particular: optimization and expansion of remote access of domestic and foreign users to the documents of the library collection, implementation of virtual reconstruction of scattered collections and funds; informational support for scientific, educational, and production projects; providing access to unique materials – rare books, archival documents, including their special types – patent, regulatory and technical, unpublished; preservation of originals that are at risk of disappearance or damage.
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The purpose of the study is to provide an analytical review of the degree of harmonisation of international and European regulations in the field of archival and library studies, and to outline methodological approaches to the implementation of an integrated management quality system in these institutions. The research methodology is based on the use of general scientific and special research methods, which ensured the comprehensive nature of scientific research. The involvement of regulatory and legal documents contributed to the use of methods of substantive and comparative analysis, additive modelling, deduction, induction, abstraction, structural and logical methodology, systematisation, and generalisation. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the actualisation of the issue of implementing integrated quality management systems in the development of library and archival studies, which is urgent in the context of the development of digitalisation, electronic document management, and provision of electronic services. The availability of quality systems in accordance with the requirements of international standards will contribute to the effective operation of these institutions and improve the quality of service provision. Conclusions. In this article, the author examines and argues for the urgent need to implement relevant international integrated quality management systems in the above-mentioned areas, namely, electronic document management, organisation of websites, management of documentary processes, and information support for the rendering of relevant services. It is stated that the integration of international standards of quality management in library and archival studies will facilitate accessibility of information needs of all users and will contribute to the efficiency and operation of these institutions of consolidated information.
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The purpose of the article is to analyse the problems of protection and rescue of cultural objects, in particular, to determine the role of digitisation of archival funds, museum and library collections as a factor of the preservation of national cultural heritage. The methodological basis of the research consists of general scientific and special methods of studying the problem, the use of which made it possible to achieve the goal. The applied methods made it possible to outline the problems of protection and rescue of cultural objects, in particular, to determine the role of digitisation of archival funds, museum and library collections. The principle of historicism, which involves considering any phenomenon in its self-development under the influence of various factors, became the main one. The historical-systemic method is aimed at the analysis of society as a whole and transformations within it, caused by changes in the political, cultural and informational and communication space. Quantitative methods were used to process the results of analytical studies, as well as to diagnose the studied phenomena, in particular, to present digitised collections in the network and rank them according to the purpose of digitisation. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the expansion of ideas about the scale of digitisation of archival funds, museum and library collections, its role in the preservation of cultural objects. Thanks to the research carried out by the authors, projects, scientific and popular scientific events are presented, the purpose of which was to discuss the problems of loss, rescue and protection of the national cultural heritage of Ukraine. The authors state that the problems of preservation of cultural values, transfer, promotion and development of cultural heritage in Ukraine are now issues of national security. Conclusions. The research have proved that the implementation of information technologies and large-scale digitization are becoming absolutely necessary for modern archives, libraries and museums, have great significance and are carried out in order to ensure accessibility, preservation and dissemination of knowledge and cultural heritage.
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The purpose of the research is to systematise and summarise known and new knowledge about analytical tools for modelling the activity of modern libraries in Ukraine. The research methodology is based on general scientific principles of comprehensive knowledge, complexity, systematicity, unity of theory and practice. The achievement of the set goal was facilitated by the use of general scientific (observation, analysis, synthesis, modelling, system approach, generalisation) and special (bibliographic, information diagnostics (express analysis), grouping) methods at the theoretical and empirical levels of research. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the systematization and generalisation of known (about models and modelling) and new knowledge (about the use of analytical modelling tools in the practical activities of Ukrainian libraries) from the point of view of the present and the perspectives of their development within the scope of one study. Conclusions. The place and role of the modern library in the global system of civilizational development is determined by its ability to be an information base for the development of human potential. That is, in today's changing world, the library is responsible for preserving, spreading and multiplying knowledge, comprehensive communication, providing a free, safe and comfortable space for learning and development, uniting communities and individual citizens. Researchers propose various models of modern library development: "Library – cultural and educational centre", "Library – scientific and information centre", "Library – public educational centre", "Library – digital hub", "Library – information and analytical centre" and others. It is clear that some models can be prioritised or combined. To build one or another effective model of the functioning and development of a modern library, appropriate analytical tools are involved in modelling: building a model canvas, brainstorming, visualisation, empathy map, SWOT analysis, and others. They help specialists generate innovative ideas, change the "rules of the game" to more effective ones, and practically transform the established form of library activity into a more perfect and modern one. Accordingly, during the implementation of the new model, document and information resources are updated, the level of communication is increased, the technological infrastructure is strengthened, the level of informatisation is increased, and the development of new competencies of specialists takes place.
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Drawing on the works of Jaques Derrida (1930–2004) – principally Archive Fever (1995) and Cinders (1987) – and Mark Fisher’s (1968–2017) Ghosts of My Life (2014) as interlocutors, I engage with concepts surrounding the electronic archive in artistic creation and research. I discuss my recent composition Ghost Gardens, a sixty-minute digital soundscape derived from the histories of Lascar sailors employed by the British East India Company during the 19th century, and current issues pertaining to climate change, habitat and species loss. I reflect upon the nature of the archive in a period of rapid environmental change, vanishing acoustic terrain and its preservation, through the lens of Ghost Gardens as a creative project which explores the intersection between sound, film, ecology and deconstruction in the digital domain. The creation of the soundscape has both utilised and generated digital film, audio and photographic archives, while the research process involved archival research pertaining to the East India Company. The sonic seascape forms part of a multi-layered, technologically enabled, interdisciplinary body of work; an ocean of sound that probes questions pertaining to the nature of recording and inscription of electronic documentation and retrieval.
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