Readers of the National Library of Armenia, many independent researchers and scholars have not been able to access the website of the National Library of Armenia since May 9, where digital versions of Armenian books, periodicals, a collection of Armenian libraries and other digitized materials are usually posted.
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The large amount of electronic resources created by the professional work of librarians in Armenia for nearly two decades are now unavailable, due to Armenia’s Nation Library’s hard drives being set ablaze. This has resulted in millions of Armenian texts and publications lost.
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Many people used them in Armenia and abroad, especially these days, when libraries are closed, readers read digital versions of books, press, magazines and read them online. But these Armenian digital databases have always been in demand, regardless of the state of emergency. To the delight of users, they were available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for free download and use.
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Acting Director of the National Library of Armenia Hrach Saribekyan announced the reason why the National Library of Armenia’s Facebook page has been unavailable today. Saribekyan said that the Ministry of Emergency Situations should assess the damage caused to the National Library. Answering the question of “Arevelq”, RA Deputy Minister of Education and Science Narine Khachaturyan said that the ministry is also waiting for the conclusion of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, but according to the preliminary description, as she said, the old servers will hardly be restored. The Deputy Minister assessed the conditions are very unfortunate as national values were kept in the devices, but added that there were digital versions of these national values, fortunately the values themselves were not damaged.
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“We are dealing with financial losses and lost work of the human years, but the values have not been physically damaged, they all have their archive versions and it is possible to restore them,” said the deputy minister.
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According to experts, it will take several tens of thousands of dollars and four to six months to buy new equipment and restore the databases. “What happened is a death blow to the library community of Armenia,” said Tigran Zargaryan, a scientist and librarian who has been a staunch advocate for the creation online databases in Armenia.
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The Collection Library of Armenia is one of the databases that operated on the failed website of the National Library of Armenia. It contains bibliographic descriptions of books, magazines, newspapers, dissertations, abstracts, maps and electronic media available in Armenian libraries. There were about 5 million bibliographic descriptions in the directory. The website also housed the “Hye Book” and “Armenian Press” databases, which digitized millions of pages. In the “Armenian Book” database alone, there were more than 20,000 digitized pages, more than 2,500,000 pages, and more than 4,600,000 digitized press pages, from Western Armenian Eastern Armenian press to the present day. This work was halted due to the state of emergency, but the already digitized databases were rich sources, starting with the first Armenian printed book.
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H/T Arevelk