Digital archives: problems of definition, systematization and boundaries of the research field. The end of the 20th – the first quarter of the 21st century

The article is devoted to the problematization and clarification of the term "digital archive", the analysis of priority areas in the research of digital archives and the issues of systematization of disparate sources in the digital space. As a result of the digital revolution and the general growth of interest in the preservation of historical heritage, new ways of processing and storing information have become widespread. Not only archives and libraries, but also scientific and educational organizations, specialists from various fields, as well as ordinary people have joined the creation and popularization of digital archives. In this context, archivists and historians were not so much interested in the definition of "digital archive", which is important for theoretical understanding, as in the specifics of working with electronic documents, ensuring their safety and use, the problems of finding approaches to the study of initially digital sources, the preservation and popularization of archival heritage in a digital environment. At the same time, many researchers (besides archivists and historians, anthropologists, folklorists, geographers, cultural scientists, historians of science, etc.) have started developing databases on topics that are close to them, which even colleagues from the same or related disciplines do not always know about. The current definitions of the term "digital archive" seem too general and vague. As a result, digital archives generally include all stored digital objects of some significance, any electronic documents, and even in the broadest sense, a social network or the entire Internet. On the other hand, the general, at first glance, definition of a digital archive as digitized collections of documents ignores initially digital documents. Taking into account the accumulated research experience, based on the analysis of the existing historiography on the problem and the identified gaps in understanding digital archives, the authors propose in the article to clarify the definition of the concept of "digital archive", drawing attention to several important circumstances: first, the need to cover both digitized and initially digital documents with this concept.; Secondly, the fact that digital documents undergo a selection procedure before becoming part of a digital archive (there will be no raw funds or random documents); thirdly, the feature of a digital archive is the presentation of documents in a systematic form. Of course, in creating a digital archive, an important role is played by the point of view when selecting documents and how they are systematized, and this is always subjective, which can both impose restrictions on their use and open up additional opportunities. The authors formulate the definition of a "digital archive" as a set of digitized or digitally created documents selected for storage and presented in a systematic way. One of the possible solutions to the problem of the fragmentation of digital sources (both digitized and initially digital) is the creation and publicly available publication of a consolidated catalog of digital archives, which is being developed by a team of authors at the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.