The ProSiberia Platform: The First Year of Operation and Development Prospects

The article aims to review the experience of creating and launching the ProSiberia platform, and to discuss the prospects for its further development. Based on the aggregation of digital sources of Siberian origin, the ProSiberia project aims to create a research platform that will bring together scholars, content curators (libraries, museums, archives) and society in order to study Siberia and position the region in the global information space. Work on the platform began in 2020 within the framework of the Program for Increasing the Competitiveness of National Research Tomsk State Unversity by the staff of the Tomsk State University Research Library. Now the platform has implemented opportunities both for humanitarian researchers and for civic science representatives (volunteers). For researchers, access to digital copies of texts about Siberia with detailed description and full-text search is organized; it is possible to create one’s own collections of texts; there are some text collaboration tools. It is also possible to find researchers with similar interests and exchange views. A volunteer can edit texts, operate a blog, participate in challenges. The platform is also being filled with new texts. Prospects for the development of the project are considered; they were formulated based on the results of surveys and focus groups. The main directions of development include: work on improving the quality of texts (attracting volunteers for their correct recognition); aggregation of digital tools for the humanities in one place for effective work with texts; attraction of partners; integration into the educational process. The most difficult issue is the aggregation of digital tools. The article lists their most interesting groups: tools for creating and working with digital facsimiles, textometric tools, and a number of tools for working with digitized manuscripts. Thus, at the moment, the initial version of the ProSiberia platform has been created. It allows implementing remotely the basic functions characteristic for any research in the field of humanities. However, most probably, the most important and difficult will be the next stage of the work, which includes, among other things, the aggregation of digital tools for working with the text of interest for the researcher. Therefore, it is extremely important to have a broad discussion in the professional community of both the work already done within the ProSiberia project and the further prospects for its development.