Paper details
Digitization of Parish Registers in Archives of the Czech Republic, Considering the Situation in the State Regional Archives in Pilsen
Author
Ludmila Novotná, State regional archives in Pilsen, Czech Republic
Co-authors
Jana Kopečková, State regional archives in Pilsen
Documents to download
Full text Foto přednášejícího / Picture Presentation
Abstract
Parish registers are among the most important and most widely used sources kept in archives. Records in parish registers have always deserved a special protection. Digitization of parish registers is the up-to-date way of protection of these resources, as well as the possibility how to make them accessible to the broad public. All archives in the Czech Republic, which keep parish registers in their depositories, started their digitization. The speech is focused on the history of parish registers as the official books, beginnings of their protection and creation of backup copies, beginnings of digitization and comparation of accessibility methods of digitized parish records in real archives in the Czech Republic. State Regional Archive in Plzeň started digitization of parish registers in 2005. Step by step, all 11 500 volumes of parish records have been digitized. At the start they have been published together with parish records from other archives on the portal www.actapublica.eu, from 2013 they are published on proprietary portal www.portafontium.eu. Apart from parish records, also other kinds of archives are digitized in State regional archive in Plzeň (as well as in other archives): deeds, chronicles and photographs. The portal „Porta Fontium“ is the result of the project „Bavarian-Czech network of historical sources“, financed from the funds of cross-border cooperation program „Target 3 Czech Republic – Free state Bavaria 2007–2013“ and Czech Republic. It makes digitized archives accessible to researchers from both western Bohemia and Bavaria.
Author's professional CV
Mgr. Ludmila Novotná born 13.2.1972
Education: Masaryk’s university in Brno, history-archiving, 1991–1996 Occupation: State regional archives in Pilsen since 1996
