The most serious reason of the restricted access to the unique collection of the first-printed Slavic books of the XV-XVI centuries is the danger of their physical destruction. But even outside of the intensive use many documents and their whole collections can disappear because of adverse conditions of a storage or the absence of duly measures of repairing. Thus, it is possible to recognize a certain debt of the libraries with respect to readers - our contemporary - who is not receiving all the information he need, and also with respect to a descendant who can not see at all many existing today sources.

The proposed project "The Creation of a digital library on the collection of the first-printed Slavic books of the XV-XVI centuries" was supported by OSI grant. It is a beginning of a large work on preservation and providing an access essence of the project is that for the first time a collection of ancient first-printed Slavic books of the XV-XVI centuries will be completely digitized and put to Internet. Modern technologies in use allow one to collect in one place the Slavic books stored in various isolated book-stocks of the world (there are the appropriate agreements with other national libraries) which for 6-7 decades have outstripped the editions of Ivan Fedorov. They were printed in a spiritual-Slavic language in Poland, Czechia, Italy and were distributed in Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia for which it was a common language.. According to the available scientific data nowadays 63 editions are known in the world. A large part of this collection is stored in the Russian State Library (RSL) but the books absent in the RSL stocks will be included in the proposed digital library as the electronic form. Combining of the editions which nowadays are distributed over the world on the compact electronic medium could become a decision of a large cultural task of a global importance. The mentioned collection is an extremely valuable for Russian, European and even world scientists.

The fulfillment of the project will be carried out in cooperation between the Russian State Library (RSL) and the Institute of High-Performance Computing and Data Bases of the Russian Ministry of Science and Technologies (IHPCDB). RSL will ensure: a study of documents and estimation of methods of their copying, works on scanning the documents, scientific researches and generalizations in order to support the electronic copies by forewords, explanations, help and search attributes. IHPCDB will ensure: both the development and realization of techniques of the information input and storage on the massive storage system (Tape Drive) and the access of end-users to this service; reliability and efficiency of the equipment.

Practical realization of the project means both for the Russian and world libraries the development of modern technologies, manufacture of an essentially new "cultural product", implantation of a qualitative new system forming, storage and use of the library stocks. Digitized books will be stored in RSL and a major part of them will be available via Internet at RSL and IHPCBD Web sites.