Nazarenko Tatiana Y.,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Tomsk Regional History Museum named after M.B. Shatilov, Tomsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Tomsk Regional History Museum Project “Siberians free and unfree” as a Complex Resource for Researchers
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2019-6-15
The authors of article raise a problem that is actual for local lore museums – the loss of interest in their resources by researchers. This is just one aspect of the segregation of scientific knowledge from the popular mass format. Museums want to retain the status of a scientific institution, position their collections as a resource for complex research. The article considers the possible complex research of Siberia on the basis of local history museums on the example of a long-term project “Siberians free and unfree” carried out in the Tomsk Regional History Museum named after M.B. Shatilov. The project was born as a result of a long collection building and study of museum funds. One of the directions of the project is collecting and publishing oral historical evidence of family and local history. Two equal parts of the project receive a description: the exhibition in the form of a “Stolypin carriage”, which serves to attract attention, and the Internet site https://сибиряки.онлайн. The site is a public platform where any participant can publicize the meanings that are important to him. By 2020, the museum has collected about 300 stories (from transcripts of biographical interviews to autobiographical fiction). These stories contain information about the history of families or places in Siberia. When collecting information, preference was given to ordinary residents of the region over people with a high level of education and social status. The corpus of stories is considered as a source for investigating the commonplace representations of historical process and studying the interest in genealogy as a cultural-historical phenomenon of post-Soviet Russia. As an example revealing the heuristic potential of stories, the author of the article takes the project of the National-Cultural Autonomy of Belarusians in the Tomsk Region. Its exhibition “The Formation of Belarusian Diaspora in the Tomsk Region According to the Personal Stories of Belarusians” has been accomplished within the framework of the project “My Ancestors come from Belarus!”. Another example taken by the author is a research held in the course of preparing the exhibition “The Great Patriotic War in memory of inhabitants of the Tomsk Region”.
Publishing: 30/12/2019
How to cite: Nazarenko T.Yu. The Tomsk Regional History Museum Project “Siberians free and unfree” as a Complex Resource for Researchers // Historical Courier, 2019, No 6 (8). P. 189–198. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2019/ISTKURIER-2019-6-15.pdf
Links: Issue 6 2019
Keywords: museum of local lore; academic science; family and local history; “Siberians free and unfree”