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Electronic Handling of the Manuscripts Collection of Petre Umikashvili (XIX c.)

Folklore is one of the most significant parts of the cultural heritage of the nation. In difference with the material monuments of culture it exists in oral form. In those countries where the fixation of this type of oral creation is to be late for different reasons, too much is lost together with their forefathers. Unfortunately, Georgia belongs to them.Hence, any new discovery of old materials is especially important for the Georgian Studies.

The scientists leading Georgian studies are well-informed about famous collection of Petre Umikashvili, whilch is the oldest collection recorded in system method, Excluding 13 tales recorded by the Catholic monk Bernardo Napoles in 17 century.In spite of a great interests to the collection of Umikashvili, the fact of inaccessibility of the collection for research was unknown up today.The reason is the violence realized on it in 30s of the last century.We mean the fact, when the publisher of the texts for making easy his work cut the sheets of the records not making systematization and recopying of the texts and separated them from their back parts, where different texts were written. Posterior publishers did not try to restore the collection for the reason of a large amount of the papers. 

• The project implies solving the problem by the use of a modern method.The manuscript will be digitalized in graphic files and will be compared with each other in automatic regime for their identification and reunion;

• Realization of the project will make accessible unknown old patterns of the Georgian folklore;

• Providing of the Georgian folklore data base with the identified manuscripts of the collection and their qualitative indicators(generes,types of motifs and so on) is a guarantee of an effective use of the results of the project for the development of the branch of the science.

On this step the implementation of the project (third quarter 2008), has created the test version of the computer software – “Umikashvili 2008”. The program will undergo test in the fourth quarter.