Contextualising a digital photographic archive of Siberian Indigenous peoples: PhD placement report

This report covers work undertaken over six months (part-time) on the PhD placement ‘Contextualising a digital photographic archive of Siberian Indigenous peoples’. The work was carried out between October 2022 and March 2023 under the supervision of Dr Katya Rogachevskaia, Lead Curator for the British Library’s Slavonic and East European Collections. The digital collection EAP016 consists of digitised images of gelatine dry plate negatives from five Siberian archives: The United Museum of the Writers of the Urals (Krasnoyarsk), the State Archive of Sverdlovsk Region (Krasnoyarsk), the Irkutsk Regional Museum, the Krasnoyarsk Region Museum of Folklore, and the Minusinsk Regional Museum. These images were digitised as a part of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) project ‘Digitising the photographic archive of southern Siberian indigenous peoples’. This report aims to accomplish several tasks. Firstly, it provides context for the content of the EAP collection by using existing Anglophone and Russophone scholarship, as well as various works on Russian colonial practices in Siberia. Secondly, it demonstrates how the BL’s print collection can enhance this visual collection. In addition, it discusses my personal experience of working with the images: the questions they provoked, my understanding of the limitations of this collection, its restrictions, and technical issues. Finally, I suggest ways to improve its accessibility for readers and researchers at the BL.