In 2023, Ukrainian archives produced over 21 million digital copies of documents, placing the country among the top in the world for digitization speed, according to the head of the State Archive Service of Ukraine.
Anatoliy Khromov believes that such digitization rates are significant and promises to further accelerate them.
"Last year, the Ukrainian archive system digitized over 21 million pages of documents. This is 17.5 times more than before 2019. We are witnessing a geometric progression in the growth of digitization rates in Ukrainian archives. Despite the war and systematic power outages in archival institutions, we plan to digitize at least 30 million copies of documents this year," Khromov promised.
The top nine countries in terms of document digitization rates in 2023 are: Finland – 34.2 million, Ukraine – over 21 million, Germany – around 21 million, Israel – over 18 million, Norway – 18 million, India – no more than 15 million, Uzbekistan – 14.7 million, the United Kingdom – 12.5 million, and Malaysia – over 10 million.
Finland, as noted by Vitaliy Skalsky, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute for Archive Affairs and Document Studies, included the number of scanned traditional documents along with those stored as born-digital, as the country has not accepted paper documents for storage since 2022.
Thus, Skalsky confidently asserts that Ukraine is a world leader in the pace of digitized archival documents.
"We counted the number of digital copies, meaning the frames created. This refers to page spreads, typically two pages per frame. If the documents are stitched, a single frame is made from one page, including blank and unfilled ones," Skalsky explained.
According to the State Archive Service, Ukraine produced three times more copies than the USA, 3.5 times more than Poland, and nearly four times more than Canada—all under wartime conditions and with minimal budget involvement.
The importance of the work of Ukrainian archives in digitizing documents was highlighted at a roundtable by Yevhenia Kravchuk, Deputy Head of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy of the Ukrainian Parliament, along with partners from the State Archive Service: Oleksandr Sichkarenko, official representative of FamilySearch International (USA) in Ukraine, and Heorhiy Vislobokov, project and program manager at “Archival Information Systems.” The discussion included leaders from various structural units of the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Digital Transformation, and Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications regarding digital development, transformations, and digitization, as well as directors of state archives in Ukraine.
