Abstract: The article is devoted to the role of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the freight supplying of the Russian Far East in 1903–1913 (since the commissioning of its last section through Manchuria along the CER). Methodologically, the article is based on a comparison of various sources: customs, port, railway statistics, reports of the Dobrovolny flot (Voluntary Fleet), etc. It is concluded that the sources do generally provide a possibility to conduct a study in the period under review, and it can be based on different tables from the foreign trade yearbooks and railway statistics on transportation to the Ussuri railroad.
The statistics are considered in two ways: 1) "import - transportation from Russia" and "by sea - by the railroad". This allows us to draw conclusions about where the goods mainly came from and how they got to the local market. Comparative statistics are built for the most important categories of goods: cereals, sugar, fuel, timber, metals, textile, etc. A comparison of the freight transportation by the railroad and by sea showed that, at least until 1909, the railroad supply was not significant, but began to grow later, when the railway transportation to the region helped to reduce the share of imports, especially in terms of supplying textiles and some categories of metal goods.

Abstract: The article describes technological aspects of digital historical map creation taking as an example the 1891–1916 Trans-Siberian Railroad map. The author faced two tasks. On the one hand, he wanted to create a historical GIS map in shapefile format; on the other hand his goal was to tell us about software tools and data which proved to be most suitable for solving the first task. Present day map services can be of use at the initial stage of digital map creation in case most of objects coincide with current ones. It is important however to know where discrepancies begin. The author studies various open access map services both corporate (Google, Yandex, Bing) and those created by many users on a crowd sourcing basis (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia). He pays particular attention to work with Google Earth application which he considers to suit better than specialized GIS applications for the initial formation of a set of objects on the map (in this case, railway lines). The author compares open map services in particular those providing access to aerial (satellite) images of the Earth and addresses different kinds of cartographic systems properties as useful tools for historical GIS creation (satellite images, panoramic photos, the Wiki mode user comments, etc.).

Abstract: The article describes a new online project presenting the statistics of the Russian Empire foreign trade in 1896–1917. The project has electronic tables with data on exports and imports throughout the period understudy and some parameters can boast a longer time period. In particular, it is the first time when consolidated time series has been published that cover the volume of foreign trade with all the countries and regions throughout the whole registration period (since 1827). The souce problems are adressed as well. Statistics of the project and the structure of on-line tables are discribed in detail. This online project is the first step to publish the consolidated statistics of the Russian Empire foreign trade. These statistics were published annually and their study involves time series analysis. In 1902 a book of collected statisctics was published, but it requires substantial amendments which haven't been done since. Now this work is planned to be completed and data tables are already available on the project website.