2025 Review: Digital Discoveries and New Opportunities at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives
As 2025 comes to a close, we sincerely thank you for your trust and collaboration with the Lithuanian State Historical Archives. The past year was full of meaningful work, growth and discoveries for us and we hope that it was so for you too.
As a New Year present, we would like to bring your attention to two important undertakings by the Lithuanian State Historical Archives.
First, in 2025, over 9,000 files from our collections were published in the digital reading room of the Electronic Archive Information System (EAIS) bringing the total number of published books to 30293. You can find the list of digitized files in Excel format, which can be easily filtered and searched by personal names, place names, or other keywords, here.
Second. we are also pleased to present Catus Sapiens Vilnensis and his transformation into our artificial intelligence assistant. With his help, in 2025 we managed to transcribe 29 inventories of Fund No. 378, “Vilnius, Kaunas, and Grodno General-Governor’s Chancellery,” containing 6,000 file titles written in Russian in the 19th century. The transcribed inventories are now available in the user-friendly “Transkribus Sites” environment, where you can view original document images alongside their textual versions, use full-text search, and quickly find the information you need.
How to use Transkribus Sites can be found here (instructions in English), and if you don’t have any ideas about what you would like to find, try taking a look at how it works by copying a word into the search field, for example, Виленский. The full list of transcribed file names will be published in Excel in early 2026.
The Vilnius, Kaunas, and Grodno General-Governor’s Chancellery was one of the most important institutions of the Russian Empire in the former lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was established after the defeat of the 1794 uprising, when the Russian occupation regime took hold in Lithuania, and operated until July 1, 1912, becoming a significant instrument of Russian imperial authority in Lithuanian history. The fund consists of 205 inventories and 151,300 storage units, with a chronological range of 1768–1915. It is one of the most important collections preserved at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives.
We sincerely thank the archive colleagues and “Transkribus” volunteers who contributed to the transcription of Fund No. 378 inventories: Asta Levickaitė, Daina Čenytė, Jekaterina Antonova, Jurgita Radėnienė, Katarina Nizovec, Nijolė Šmitaite, Rytis Misiūnas, Robert Jesipov, Karolina Kaniušėnaitė, Paulius Klevinskis, Simonas Jonikas, Vaiva Kazanavičiūtė, Darius Ledauskas, Ina Samanavičiūtė-Grigoravičienė, and Irina Milevič. We also want to thank READ-Coop (Austria), for their artificial intelligence software “Transkribus”.
We invite you to explore, read, and discover archival documents in a new, convenient way!
Happy New Year!