National British Library Grant – Endangered Archives
University Library “Svetozar Markovic” teamed with the Book and Travel Museum, NGO Adligat, received the grant of the British National Library awarded within the programme Endangered Archives for the project “Safeguarding the Fragile Collection of the Private Archive of the Lazic Family”.
This is a prestigious programme for libraries and within the project of the University Library an exclusive archive owned by the Lazic family will be digitized, assigned metadata and presented to the public. The archive consists of rare periodicals, rare calendars, law books which have never been digitized and letters and postcards of Serbian soldiers from the First World War.
The fact that, among other publications, the public will be for the first time presented with the official secret journal of the Serbian government in exile “Pregled listova”, unpublished personal correspondence of Zivojin Misic, extremely rare law books and calendars which cannot be found in other archives, a part of the materials from Corfu and rare publications by Geca Kon, testifies to the value of this collection.
This project is important because extremely damaged material of great historical importance will be permanently digitally stored and preserved. Digital presentation of these archival materials will be presented in the physical space via the cutting edge digital technology the Magic Box and it will be in open access on the project website created by the University Library. Researchers in the field of history, sociology, philology and other humanities will be able to access these invaluable materials, which will also be accessible via the British National Library website.
The University Library team which will coordinate the project consists of: Professor Aleksandar Jerkov – CEO, dr Adam Sofronijevic – Deputy Head, dr Vasilije Milnovic – Project Manager, PhDc Milena Kostic – researcher and Natasa Dakic – metadata specialist.