In the world of archives - Fire at Institute in Moscow

The big news story in the world of archives at the moment is the fire that occurred at the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences in Moscow last Friday. The institute holds over 10 million documents and only a small portion of the records had been digitised.

This kind of news is always devastating for archivists and academics. The fire at the National Library of Wales in 2014 was a big concern but fortunately a large portion of documents were saved. With the Russian institute we don't yet know how much is lost and how much is recoverable, although the director, Yuri Pivovarov has said that he doesn't think their Slavic text collection has been affected. I don't know what Emergency Plan the Institute had in place, but let's hope its effective for salvaging what remains.