One of the forms of cultural heritage protection is digitisation. Therefore, following the approved National Concept for the Development of State Archives, the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic has prepared a project for the digitisation and modernisation of State Archives that will be funded by the European financing contribution.

The project aims to establish 10 digitisation workplaces and equip them with the necessary technology, infrastructure and staff to digitise archival content effectively. It also plans to complete the development of new functionalities of the information systems of the digital archives to make archival content accessible to citizens, increasing the efficiency and quality of the archives’ work and reducing the costs associated with archival processing documents. It is about building a technological digitisation and information system based on the existing system of the Interior Slovak Republic Ministry and its Electronic Archives, including using existing data centres.

This concept will significantly reduce input costs and increase the solution’s safety and reliability.

The project, therefore, will aim at:

  • building digitisation workplaces and significantly increasing storage and processing capacities to solve the existing archival debt;
  • improving the digitisation program of selected archival documents for the following years and its cost, technological and personnel sustainability.
  • upgrading the current HW and developing the Electronic Archives and implementating new functionalities (modules) to increase the efficiency and quality of the work of the archives during digitisation, in particular, providing:
  • Module for automating the description of digitised metadata
  • ArchivLog module for recording and management of processes related to the life cycle of archival documents
  • Module of machine learning and analytics of the digitisation process
  • Infrastructure development module.

A critical challenge in digitising archival documents is to stop the creation of archival debt, which is currently at 50 kilometres of unprocessed archival documents. With the need to digitise relevant content within 10 years, the only way to achieve this goal is to significantly increase the work’s efficiency. The only practical solution is using automation technologies with the application of machine learning elements and their integration into the existing IS.