The personal archives of Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) are in the custody of Archives of RAS. Personal archives of V. I. Vernadsky (Fund 518) represent 10 inventories containing 4591 files on 136302 sheets of archive documents.

The information resource “Vernadsky’ s archives” has been developed in Department of Insurance Documentary Fund of Archives of RAS and represents a database describing one of the sections of users fund on microfiches of Archives of RAS – personal archives of .V. I. Vernadsky. The supplement has been developed for navigation and search of the materials for specialists concerned. Such fields as “file number”, “name of file”, “material type”, and “dates of document issue” serve as a guide to a variety of documents and assist in finding sections of interest and ordering copies of documents from fund keepers.

At present about 30 % of all documents of the archives have been digitized and accessible to users. It amounts to 41116 pages. The total volume of available information is 4.16 Gb.

The work on digitizing of the archives has been continuing and the resource will be supplemented. The information resource “Vernadsky’s archive” has been developed in the Department of Insurance Documentary Fund of the RAS Archives together with the Institute of Problems of Information Science of the RAS.

---

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky

The scientific heritage of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky marked the beginning of a new Weltanschauung and his name became a symbol of nowadays thinking. The creative work of V. I. Vernadsky is a distinguished phenomenon not only for Russian and for Ukrainian culture but for the world culture as well.

The V. I. Vernadsky’s doctrine about the noosphere at the beginning of the new millennium demonstrates a tendency to globalization and is considered as an alternative to understanding of the principles of sustainable development of the world community and the beginning of the formation of the noosphere concept development. Unlikely it is necessary to convince anybody that the mankind faces the need to comprehend the ways of its development and elaboration of a new doctrine allowing if not elimination but minimization of negative effects leading to destruction of the civilization and even posing a question of biological survival.

As an outstanding naturalist and a great thinker Vernadsky belongs to the cohort of naturalists-encyclopedists who tried to understand the essence of the world as a whole - “to make a remarkable grasp of the nature’’- as he put it.

But the most important thing he made was his doctrine about the BIOSPHERE and its transition to the sphere of intellect – to the noosphere. This doctrine lays the foundation for solving the problems of the civilization sustainable development.

The issues of ecological safety and survival under the impact of technogeneous load, mutual relations between nations and different social groups, the dependence of the people and living substance on cosmic phenomena – all that we call “sustainable development of civilization” - was not only predicted by V. I. Vernadsky. His merit is in highlighting the basic approaches to the solution of these problems.

And though his ideas of interaction of inert, living and social basis of our planet were formulated in the first half of the past century and he continued to work on them till his last days, they take a real social importance nowadays. The time has come for their implementation into practice.