Kazakhstan’s archives go digital as Almaty discusses AI and blueprint preservation

Why archivists met

On 27 September, Almaty hosted an international conference on scientific and technical documentation. It brought together researchers and archivists from Kazakhstan, the US, Finland, Latvia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, along with master’s and doctoral students.

The discussion covered converting drawings and project records into digital formats, preserving files for the long term and using artificial intelligence to analyse large collections. Latvian specialists presented their experience in digitising scientific and technical documents.

Why this is harder than ordinary scanning

An archival scan must preserve scale, colour, margins, annotations and the link to the original. A missing line or a misread number can change the meaning of an engineering drawing. Quality control, metadata, backups and a clear history of every transformation are therefore essential.

AI can recognise handwritten notes, locate recurring objects and help researchers search by meaning. An algorithmic recommendation must not replace an archivist’s description, however: a model can be wrong, while authenticity must be verifiable independently of search convenience.

What the public gains

Good digitisation opens the history of factories, roads, buildings and research projects without repeatedly handling fragile originals. It also makes it easier to connect documents across collections and find evidence for restoration and scholarship.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Kazakhstan.