Archives of Azerbaijan in the Orbit of International Scientific, Informational, and Cultural Relations in Early 21st Century

Abstract

The paper is devoted to one of the trends of development of archiving in Azerbaijan in the second half of the 1990s-2010s, international cooperation in the archival field. It is to study the activities of Azerbaijani archivists aimed at interacting with international archival community, including determining the role and place of inter-archival dialogue within the framework of participation of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the cultural cooperation with Russia and other CIS countries. The National Archival Fund (NAF) of Azerbaijan is an extensive collection of documents of high scientific, historical, and cultural significance. The authors emphasize that presence in the NAF of Azerbaijan of a large number of documents in Russian and languages of the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus expands prospects of participation of the Azerbaijani archives in international research and in educational projects in the post-Soviet space. The study notes importance of Internet publication of documents from the non-state part of the NAF of Azerbaijan (private collections, family archives, etc.), as they become a part of the cultural dialogue of online communities in post-Soviet countries. In 2002, the Decree of the first President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev “On the improvement of archiving in the Republic of Azerbaijan” included search, digitization, and publication of archival materials as sources on the national history formation in the priorities of the work of archives of Azerbaijan. The authors focus on the most significant publications of documents from the State Archive of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the State Historical Archive of the Republic of Azerbaijan, propagating archival heritage of Azerbaijan in the scientific information space of Eurasia. Programs for identifying and copying written sources on the history of Azerbaijan, stored in the archives of Russia and other post-Soviet states, countries of the Middle East, the European Union, and the United States, take a significant place in the scientific and cultural policy of modern Azerbaijan. The article characterizes achievements of the Institute of Manuscripts of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Azerbaijan in the field of archival heuristics abroad. It concludes that there is significant potential for development of international relations of Azerbaijani archival institutions, including expansion of cooperation between Azerbaijani archivists and their colleagues in Russia and the CIS countries.