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New technologies profoundly change Matenadaran’s possibilities either in preserving the fund or studying it and making it available for the public. In 2011 Matenadaran will be open to its researchers and visitors presenting new constructed reading hall and storehouse, as well as new technologies which are partially available on www.matenadaran.am web site.

 But still making the fun available for its researchers, visitors or just guests is a problem of great significance. In fact taking a book out of reserve where special temperature rules is significantly dangerous for the issue, but leaving it there means to ban studying it. To guarantee the protection of the book but at the same time to make it possible for the reader to study it, high quality images should be provided. The pieces of famous micro sculptors’ Levsha’s Steel Flea, Willard Wigan’s and Edward Ghazaryan’s violinist, dancers in the needle’s eye are useless to show as even magnifying glass makes it impossible to enjoy. Magnified images of those micro sculptures should be available in Matenadaran.

Creation of digital images, their protection and making them available for broader public show need serious solutions and are extremely expensive. To provide each of 200 readers (reading hall is constructed for serving 200 readers) several similar pages supposes expensive servers, expensive communication equipments, projects and computers.

The ordinary equipments which are constructed to solve modern challenges may cost $6-8 million. Technologies by Avianfotel CJSC gave chance to Matenadaran to meet modern challenges. Hence, those high technological equipments gave readers and researchers unique opportunity to study the manuscripts without taking them out of the reserves.

“We are granted a unique chance to present to the world such a high quality of Armenian miniature painting which is unavailable for any type of media. Matenadaran’s staff prefers to study the pieces using the digitalized magnified version rather than the originals,” Ara Khizmalyan, the director of archive documents and department of digitalization told Panorama.am.

“Today only Matenadaran is granted such opportunity to study the materials and to make them open to the public. Taking as an example “Hill” library’s web site, we can have only light impression of what we see. Prado museum’s web site performs some competitive solutions. It’s worth mentioning that our organization provided to Matenadaran not only equipment for digitalization or web site, but a searching system,” Aram Vrtanesyan, the technical manager of “Aviafontel” told Panorama.am.