On the issue of the source base for the history of digitalization of enterprises of the fuel and energy complex of Russia (the turn of the 20th–21st centuries)

The view of Russian historical science on the digitalization of enterprises of the fuel and energy complex of Russia in the late 20th – early 21st centuries is only being formed. Obviously, weak attention to this topic is due to unsufficient source base, which is only beginning to form, and which has become the subject of the study. The rele-vance of the topic also lies in the transfer of valuable experience to historians who connect their scientific activities with technical, technological and economic topics. The purpose of the work is to show the mechanism for collecting historical sources and determining their classification type. The article shows the features and results of the search for historical sources on the topic on the Internet, in federal and regional archives and libraries, as well as among direct participants in the events under consideration. The author emphasizes that the corpus of discovered sources has a wide range of types: regulatory and legal, office documentation, periodicals, sources of personal origin. A comprehensive analysis made it possible to identify the information value of each group, their common features and distinctive characteristics. Based on the use of comparative analysis, it can be argued that the source base played a key role in identifying specific examples of digitalization and determining its main actors. At the same time, the main contribution to the formation of the topic's content was made by documents from federal and regional archives. These are, first of all, the state archives of the Russian Federation, Tyumen and Tomsk regions, as well as the Russian State Archive of Economics. At the same time, there is an obvious shortage of statistical materials, which can be explained by the lack of methodological require-ments for production reports of fuel and energy enterprises. The main problem in the process of searching for the neces-sary sources was the restrictive measures of access to some documents by archival institutions. The final conclusion is that the extracted information allows us to quite fully and qualitatively reveal the main issues of the history of digitali-zation of the fuel and energy complex of Russia at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries – these are causes, dynamics, forms, methods, results and significance.