Creation of a multimedia electronic system "Wagon Building Plant"

Maslov Vitaly Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0002-1830-4657 PhD in History Senior Researcher, Research Center for Social and Humanitarian Informatics, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University 236000, Russia, Kaliningrad region, Kaliningrad, Chernyshevsky str., 56a, office 35 VMaslov@kantiana.ru Baranova Elena Vyacheslavovna ORCID: 0000-0001-7519-4258 PhD in History Director, Research Center for Social and Humanitarian Informatics, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University 236000, Russia, Kaliningrad region, Kaliningrad, Chernyshevsky str., 56a, office 35 EBaranova@kantiana.ru

Eryomina Vasilisa Vyacheslavovna ORCID: 0009-0002-0893-971X Programmer, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University 236041, Russia, Kaliningrad region, Kaliningrad, A. Nevsky str., 14 tambov.3d@gmail.com

Kaliningrad Carriage Building Plant

The Car Building Plant is a leading machine–building enterprise in the Kaliningrad region. It was created on the basis of the Konigsberg Wagon Building Factory ^{[1, p. 177]} while maintaining the profile of the previous production.

The decision to restore the enterprise was made in November 1945; a special commission adopted the Konigsberg (since July 1946 Kaliningrad) Car building Plant. The date of formation of the Soviet enterprise is considered to be February 24, 1946. The plant was damaged during World War II. Restoration work at the new enterprise was carried out from March 1946, and was completed in 1950 ^{[2, p. 72]}. However, the first products – the first five Soviet 20-ton dumpcars ^{[3, p. 125]} – were released already in April 1946 ^{[4, d. 2, l. 61; d. 6, l. 2]}. Then the load capacity of the self-unloading wagons grew – 40-, 50-, 60-, 95-, 120- tons, and in 1963 the factory workers began to produce 180-ton wagons ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 39, 61, 192, 215, 251, 301]}. In different periods of its history, the plant produced, in addition to dumpcars, battery forklifts, platforms for railway cranes, freight cars ^{[4, 125, l. 4, 91; 154, l. 4; 168, l. 2, 9, 32]}, wagons for transporting hot agglomerate ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 150]}, spare parts for railway transport ^{[6, pp. 80, 81]}. Until 1953, car builders overhauled the old Konigsberg trams ^{[7, l. 8-9]}. The plant, like all large industrial enterprises, produced consumer goods in Soviet times. Dumpcars were used all over the country, at the most famous Soviet construction sites – at the Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station, the Volga-Don Canal, and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. Self-unloading wagons were supplied to the GDR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Mongolia, Japan, China, North Korea, and Cuba ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 114, 127, 186, 200, 214; vol. 2, pp. 69, 89, 113]}.

Newspaper "Vagonostroitel"

At first, the bullyuten "For the rhythmic work" of the wall newspaper "Vagonostroitel" was periodically released at the plant. Until January 1955, more than 70 issues of the bulletin were published. Since November 1955, the large-circulation newspaper "Vagonostroitel" began to be published (Fig. 1). Later, in the subtitle of the newspaper, it was mistakenly indicated that it had been published since November 1956. At first, the newspaper was an organ of the factory bureau/party committee of the Communist Party, the head of the trade union committee, the Komsomol Committee and the factory directorate. Since 1990 it became a printed publication of the plant's staff, then of the joint–stock company "Vagonostroitel" ^[8]. In 2015, by a court decision, the registration of this mass media was terminated ^[9].

Fig. 1. The page of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel"

The newspaper was published once a week, first on 4 pages, and from the mid-1970s on two pages. Its circulation has varied over the years; for example, in 1955 it was 500, in the 1960s it reached 1,850 copies, since the late 1970s it has been 1210-1240 copies. "Vagonostroitel" was printed in the printing house of the newspaper Kaliningradskaya Pravda, then in the Kaliningrad city Printing house. Since January 1966, the newspaper has been issued an appendix "Youth" on 2 pages.

The main part of the publications in Vagonostroitel were devoted to the production activities of the enterprise, the organization of socialist competition, labor strikers, criticism of lagging units and negligent workers. In Soviet times, the newspaper necessarily covered the activities of party and Komsomol organizations. Reports were also published on the cultural life of factory workers, their sports hobbies, the condition of dormitories and the construction of residential buildings, patronage assistance to schools and rural workers. In general, the subject matter of the newspaper materials was very diverse. Articles by professional journalists, notes by workers' correspondents (workers' correspondents), letters from employees of the enterprise were printed on the pages of "Vagonostroitel". The newspaper contained photographs of the leading men of production, veterans of the plant, its workshops, and various events. Cartoons and feuilletons in the satirical section "Under the chisel. The grandson of a Crocodile at the plant" the newspaper reacted to the shortcomings, the unworthy behavior of some employees. Thus, the materials of the multi-edition "Vagonostroitel" are, along with archival documents, a valuable source on the history of the Kaliningrad Wagon Building Plant of the Soviet era.

The newspaper was printed on paper that was not of high quality, so by now there was a problem with the preservation of the printing organ. In addition, in Kaliningrad, the files of a newspaper published in Soviet times are concentrated in various institutions. Complete annual sets are not always available in the regional universal scientific library, the regional state archive; individual numbers have been transferred to the regional historical and art museum. Some files of the Kaliningrad "Wagon Builder" are also kept in the Russian State Library. Some of the numbers for 1955-1956, 1966-1970, 1972, 1975-1978, 1982-1987 and 1989-1990 were deposited in the archive of JSC "Vagonostroitel". This selection turned out to be infected with a fungus, so it was processed at low temperatures in a special chamber purchased by the Museum of the World Ocean ^[10].

All domestic car-building plants produced large-circulation newspapers, which have been preserved in local libraries or archives, but at the moment a significant part of the issues (848 issues, 1901 pages) of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel" of the Soviet period has been digitized by the forces of the I. Kant BFU only of the Kaliningrad plant. Similar periodicals of the Tver and Abakan Car-building plants have been digitized only for the post-Soviet period. The Soviet periodicals of the Altai and Ust-Katavsky factories continue to be stored in non-digitized form. Some issues of the Krasnoyarsk newspaper "Vagonostroitel" have been scanned, but unlike the Kaliningrad version they do not have a search engine.

The condition of the newspaper and the lack of a single place for its storage dictated the need for rapid digitization of the multi-issue edition, which was located in JSC Vagonostroitel (the staff of the regional library also scanned and posted on the institution's website the preserved numbers for 1956, 1959-1964, 1966-1968). Digitization of the printed edition from the archive of the joint-stock company was carried out with the assistance of its management on the basis of the BFU named after I. The Scientific Research Center for Social and Humanitarian Informatics (SIC SGI) within the framework of the 445-L-23 project "Multimedia open educational electronic system "Wagon Building Plant", implemented with the support of the Academic Strategic Leadership Program "Priority 2030" of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. The digitization was actively attended by students of the second year of the bachelor's degree in the fields of History, Philosophy, Philology (Russian language and literature; Polish).

The newspaper was scanned in PDF format* on a professional EPSON scanner, the newspaper was not embroidered, but neatly laid out on the glass. At the moment, the SIC SGI has the most complete selection of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel". It is worth noting that the presence of various newspaper collections in organizations has raised the question for the scientific community of Kaliningrad about creating a unified system for storing digital archives of local periodicals and open access to them. This issue is currently being actively discussed.

Stages of digitization of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel"

The first stage in the creation of an electronic system was the transfer of scanned issues, with a volume of more than 600 gigabytes, to cloud storage. Unfortunately, such a volume of data could not load correctly the first time, it was necessary to re-overwrite the files, after checking, many duplicates were revealed, which were cleaned using the Total Commander program.

The second stage included image optimization, followed by recognition and creation of *.txt files. Due to the fact that the scanning was carried out by several students, more than 120 thousand files had to be standardized, converted into a single format, and also removed the color scheme, which could be recognized incorrectly. To solve these tasks, code was written in the Python programming language, which used several modules; the OCR Tesseract package was selected for recognition (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract /). Research shows that Tesseract does this job best when there is a clear separation of the foreground text from the background, but in practice it is extremely difficult to guarantee this. Therefore, it is necessary to prescribe classifiers and detectors specific to this task.

Nevertheless, OCR Tesseract optimally allows for digitization work in the Python programming environment when it is necessary to process a sufficiently specific source containing articles in newspaper column format. In total, it took about 35 days to recognize the releases (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Part of the Python script for recognizing and optimizing the newspaper

The third stage: uploading the results to the server of the Baltic Federal University named after I. Kant. The main problem here was the low download speed, up to about 2.1 Mbps, while downloading could only take place from two devices that had access to the local part of the server. To speed up the download somewhat, all releases were compressed into a zip archive.

The fourth stage: unfolding pages based on the created folder hierarchy (RRIs. 3), customize the appearance, as well as the association of pages with the search. To implement this stage, Python programming language code was also used.

Fig. 3. Part of the Python script for creating a folder hierarchy on the server

The last, fifth, stage: the creation of the graphical shell was performed on the Bitrix 24 platform using landing page creation modules. This module was chosen primarily for its high degree of adaptability to various types of interfaces, as well as for ease of use, since there are plans to transfer and expand the number of pages, it was necessary to choose the most optimal type of editor that will be as comfortable as possible to use even for a beginner. At the same time, it is worth noting that Bitrix has quite detailed settings that allow professionals to fully manage the system.

After configuring the interface and adapting it for tablet and mobile devices, two sections with frames were created, into which a simplified version of the electronic database design was integrated.

Using digitized materials

At the moment, the newspaper "Vagonostroitel" is located at https://kaliningradka.kantiana.ru/lp/lp/vagonka/vagonka_arhiv / (Fig. 4). And is a digital archive broken down by year, month and number. The entire issue is located sequentially on one page in the form of scans. It is worth noting that a search system is also implemented on the basis of the newspaper. Which shows the strip with the desired text, the system is being finalized. The newspaper itself has been deposited in the library of the Museum of the World Ocean.

Fig. 4. Screenshot of the website with the archive of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel"

The digitized materials of the newspaper "Vagonostroitel" make up most of the issues of this small-circulation publication that have been preserved in the region. When combining the resulting array of digitized newspaper files with incomplete sets stored in the regional scientific library and the regional state archive, a full-fledged database of materials on the production activities of one of the largest enterprises in the region and the lives of its workers is created. The placement of digitized materials on the Internet (on the server of the I. Kant BFU) with an effective search system makes the newspaper accessible to all those interested in the fate of the plant, helps the descendants of factory workers to learn about the lives of parents, grandparents, which contributes to the education of patriotic feelings and family values. The discovered and digitized office documentation transferred to the archive significantly complements the existing archival fund of the plant, expands opportunities for a comprehensive and objective study of its history.