THE RUSSIAN STATE ARCHIVE OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION (RGANTD)

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documents, located in Moscow, holds scientific and technical documentation concerning industrial development, patents, and personal papers of well-known scientists, scholars, inventors, and engineers. But perhaps the most interesting materials are those related to the Soviet space program, which includes not only technical documentation, but films, photographs, and audio recordings of the historic achievements made in rocket design and space travel.

The Archive possess a 5-storey building of 2.5 thousand square meters where the documents are stored, and the Lab of Document Microfilming and Restoring. At present the construction of the 11-storey administrative and technical building is in progress.

The storerooms can deposit 700,000 documents: scientific and technical paper documents - 200,000 units, film-, photo- and video-documents - 200,000 units, audio-, machine-readable and telemetric documents - 300,000 units.

The RGANTD has special storerooms equipped with stands and shelves (for documents on tapes), automatic systems of monitoring the temperature and relative humidity, security and fire alarms. The RGANTD rooms store more than 300,000 units that reflect the activities of at least 180 entities of the space and war industries, of the scientific and technical complex of the country.

High professional skills of the RGANTD staff and its modern equipment allow computer restoration and processing of deposited documents. In the Archive, you can find answers to all your questions related to space exploration: from the date of the flight and the composition of the space crew to the technical drawing of the smallest bolts and nuts of the spaceship.

Work on a User Video Library is in progress (VHS, Betacam cassettes). Unique photo documents related to S. P. Korolyov and Yuri A. Gagarin have been digitized and recorded on an optical disk.