Safeguarding the fragile collection of the private archive of the Lazic family (EAP833)

Aims and objectives

The aim of this project is to digitise and thus preserve for posterity extremely valuable private archive and library collections owned by the Lazic family in Serbia, who for six generations have collected important and rare material. The collection includes rare law books published in the early 20th century by Geca Kon, an important Serbian publisher who was killed in a camp in World War Two; Serbian war publications (1914-1918); issues of the rare periodicals Pregled listova, Misao, and Krfske novine; calendars from the late 19th century; and archival material from World War One. The collection of rare and unique materials do not exist elsewhere in other libraries and their preservation is of great importance for researchers. For example, Serbian newspapers printed in Corfu and in Thessaloniki during the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia.

Approximately 50,000 pages will be digitised and the digital copies deposited with the University Library ‘Svetozar Markovic’ and the British Library. The original material will remain with the Lazic family in their private collection.

Outcomes

The digitisation process lasted for four months and 12,500 pages were scanned each month. Two scanners ,a robotic book scanner and flatbed colour image scanner, owned by the University Library “Svetozar Marković” were used at this stage to ensure both speed of scanning and possibility for scanning of physically delicate materials.  In total, the EAP team scanned 50,055 pages.

Blog post reporting from the 'New Horizons of Digitisation in Serbia' conference, held at the University Library ‘Svetozar Marković’ in Belgrade on 23 January 2017.

The records copied by this project have been catalogued as: