Work has begun in Mykolaiv on creating a single online collection of the industrial heritage of Southern Ukraine. This involves digitizing museum artifacts related to the region’s industrial history and then combining them into an open multimedia database. This was reported by the Mykolaiv Development Agency.
The future digital collection will be formed on the basis of materials from the holdings of the Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum, the Mykolaiv Regional Museum of Local Lore and the Museum of Shipbuilding and Fleet. These institutions preserve a significant part of the memory of Mykolaiv region’s industrial past: from shipbuilding and factory culture to workers’ everyday life and the history of large industrial facilities.
Project manager Yevhen Homonyuk explained that the initiative aims to present the region’s industrial history not only as a set of technical facts or production achievements, but as part of Ukrainian cultural heritage.
“Mykolaiv region has always been the industrial heart of Southern Ukraine, but beneath hard human labor, metal and machines there is always a deep and unique aesthetic. Bringing together the collections of various leading regional institutions into a single thematic collection is our way of showing that Ukrainian heritage is multifaceted, resilient and ready to open up to the world in the language of modern digital technologies,” says Yevhen Homonyuk, project manager.
According to the organizers, the project is intended to remove the barrier between closed museum storage facilities and modern audiences. After digitization, the exhibits will become available not only to specialists but to everyone interested in the history of Mykolaiv, the industrial development of Southern Ukraine and local identity.
Digital copies of the materials are planned to be placed on the bilingual platform “Mykolaiv Digital Heritage” in Ukrainian and English. Access to them will be open 24/7, allowing researchers, educators, students, local historians and the general public to work with these materials remotely and in a convenient format.
The online collection is expected to include copies of unique thematic materials: production albums, early photographic prints, postcards, photographs of tools, memorial artifacts, including personal belongings of Mykolaiv industrial workers, among whom there were also those who were repressed.
The digital database will also present graphics and paintings with genre scenes of workers’ lives in the industrial sector, materials on the construction of landmark facilities — from shipyards to a nuclear power plant — as well as rare printed publications that reflect particular historical facts, social phenomena and events of the city and region.
The project “Industrial Heritage of Mykolaiv Region” is being implemented by the NGO “RUM” through the MyArt platform in partnership with the Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum, the Mykolaiv Regional Museum of Local Lore, the Museum of Shipbuilding and Fleet and the Mykolaiv Development Agency.
The initiative is being implemented within the framework of the MUSEUM FUTURES program, carried out by RIBBON International and Mystetskyi Arsenal in cooperation with the NGO “Community of the Mystetskyi Arsenal”.
Previously we wrote:
- An ancient burial mound was bulldozed, the monument lost forever: the agronomist’s case sent to court
- Not only seas and beaches: the best photo of Mykolaiv region was an ancient island from above
- Decommunization continues: two Soviet monuments in Mykolaiv lost protected status
- Exhibits from Kherson museums will be searched for through Interpol
- They waited a hundred years — and it happened: in Mykolaiv they decided what to do with the DOF… for now only on paper
