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Lithuanian Central State Archive (LCVA)

Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas, the Lithuanian Central State Archive, is the biggest one within the state archival service. It comes under jurisdiction of the Lithuanian Archives Department at the Government of the Republic of Lithuania. The main mission of its activity is collecting and safeguarding of paper based and audiovisual documents to future generations, providing permanent public access to its collections.

The Department of Image and Sound Documents at the Lithuanian Central State Archive was founded in 1955. Since 1965 until 2002 it was an independent archive, and since 2002 the archive was reorganized, being integrated into the Lithuanian Central State Archive again.

Lithuanian Central State Archive has been a member of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) since 2004. The Audiovisual complex consists of film, sound, video recordings and photo documents. The division of Image and Sound is the main repository of cinema heritage in Lithuania and holds a total of 7.612 titles: Lithuanian chronicles from 1920-1940, the chronicles of the Second World years, diverse Lithuanian newsreels and sketches from the post-war period, Lithuanian feature films, documentaries of independent film studios and individual creators, starting from 1991. The oldest original film is „The funeral of dr. Jonas Basanavicius“, created in 1927, but there are also copies of 1919-1926 years chronicles as well.

There are four basic tasks that are performed by the archive’s Film department – acquisition, documentation, access and preservation. The films are collected from public organizations, private institutions, and private persons. Some of them are acquired from abroad. A homemade program for computer film data system is based on “Microsoft Access”. This information system contains all data about film documents on the title level. Because of the emerged possibilities and demand in 2003 the Archive began to digitize films by using self-constructed digitization equipment. After this they are transferred to computer, edited, subtitled, sounded and copied to DVD or mini DV according of our technical possibilities and customers requests. Since 2006 there are only digital copies created for users. The films are also being digitized for preservation purposes. By now there are 155 titles of films digitized, making safety copies in mini DV, and 243 titles of films digitized, making usage copies in DVD.


www.archyvai.lt