Society and Culture: Volunteers from 60 countries created a unique electronic archive featuring the history of the Bolshoi Theatre

The "Discover the history of the Bolshoi" project engaged almost eight thousand volunteers from 60 countries. The organizers were ABBYY and KAMIS along with the Bolshoi Theatre administration.

Volunteers studied materials stored in the electronic database of the theatre museum. As a result, they collected information about almost thirty thousand opera productions, eighteen thousand ballet performances and five thousand concerts.

Now, the museum specialists will analyse a huge array of data. Volunteers digitized about fifty thousand posters, more than one hundred and twenty thousand playbills and one hundred thousand photographs using artificial intelligence. First, they scanned all historical documents. Then they selected information: the names of the performances, artists, conductors, and more.

Then the data was handled by the volunteers. Besides Russians, the volunteers were residents of China, Europe, India, Brazil, the United States, and Australia. They checked the data to make electronic versions of documents identical to the originals.

Volunteers were also involved in the classification of historical photographs. They entered texts on the back of images in an electronic database. Thanks to their efforts, photographs of many great artists - Maya Plisetskaya, Feodor Chaliapin, Galina Ulanova and others - will be widely available.

Volunteers of the "Discover the history of the Bolshoi" project helped to collect interesting information about the history of the main stage of Russia.