Today we open MediaArhiv — a new online library of rare historical books, free to read right in your browser.
The archive gathers editions from the late 19th and early 20th century that have long since entered the public domain: travel notes and memoirs, military histories, statistical surveys of regions, and accounts by foreign travellers on Ukraine, Crimea, the Caucasus and the Black Sea. Among the first books are works by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Stepan Rudnytskyi and Arnold Margolin, as well as British and American correspondents' records on the Crimean War and the 1919 pogroms.
Every book is readable page by page in four interface languages — Ukrainian, English, Russian and Polish — and where an edition is translated, you can switch between the text's languages as well. Editions come with links to the original scans on archive.org. The catalog can already be browsed by genre, author, place, country and year — quick filters find the right edition in a minute.
This is only the beginning: the archive's collection will keep growing, and the Articles section will feature pieces about the editions themselves, their authors and the world they describe. Welcome to reading!