To the Day of Archives, we start the “Digital Public Finances and Public Administration Archive” Project

Jointly with the ANO Information Culture, the Gaidar Institute has launched “The Digital Public Finances and Public Administration Archive”, a new public project which is available at FinLibrary.ru. The project’s initiator is Alexei Kudrin, Advisor on the Yandex corporate development and a member of the Gaidar Institute’s Board of Trustees.

The project’s main goal is to preserve historical sources on public finances and public administration and make them available to economists, historians, scholars, authors and all interested persons.

The “Digital Public Finances Archive” website is planning to gather within the framework of a single e-resource the most complete and available collection of materials on the history and evolution of public finances for over 200 years, that is, from the budgets of the Russian Empire early in the 19^th century to the present-day electronic budget of the Russian Federation. The projects’ all materials are available under open licenses.

“Nearly 25 years ago, the Ministry of Finance started to preserve, form and popularize the history of public finances. I am pleased to say that this process is actively gaining momentum thanks to the efforts of a new generation of experts in computer information processing.

I wish success to scholars and users of the “Digital Public Finances and Public Administration Archive” Project in their challenging and extremely interesting work, which requires universal skills in various fields from history and archives to modern digital technologies. I am confident that the project will become soon a popular and highly-sought resource with the Russian audience. The earliest research materials date back to the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. Scholars – from classical historians to data analysts – will receive an access to unique and previously unavailable materials spanning the period of two centuries of Russian public finances, while students of specialized disciplines will be able to implement their projects using digitized data sets.”

Alexei Kudrin, Doctor of Economic Sciences, Chief Scientist, Member of the Board of Trustees of the Gaidar Institute, RF Finance Minister (2000-2011).

The “Digital Public Finances Archive” project already includes over 1000 electronic copies of rare and unique materials, as well as several dozens of machine-readable datasets formed on the basis of digitized and verified information from primary source materials.

We invite you to visit the “Digital Public Finances Archive” website to become familiar with rare and previously unavailable archive sources!