The purpose of the publisher in a digital era is to follow the principles of correct transmission of all the features of the historical source. At the same time work with texts from family collections needs to strike a balance between personal and public to avoid publishing the information that could possibly compromise third parties. This is one of the most difficult tasks of private archives publishing, the key to which can only be found in close cooperation with the heirs and administrators of family archives. We offer some solutions to these problems within the « Prozhito» (prozhito.org) – the first global database of 400 diverse non-authorized private diaries (150,000 entries), tied to a chronological line, representing personal narratives from the XIX-XX centuries in Russian and Ukrainian. “Prozhito“ blends the structural experience of blog platforms and archival tradition of curating personal writings. User can work not only with particular texts but with the whole collection of diary entries, building complex search queries by author’s gender and age, journal types (f.e, war, tourist, dream etc.) and filtering results by exact dates and places of records. In Prozhito the manuscript owners (person or family) continue to participate in its preparation for publication and control the text on all the steps of its transformation from the manuscript to the machine-readable database unit. They have the right to exclude fragments, considered unappropriate due to ethical reasons. Working with a family history often activates intrafamily communication, but the information, stored in the family archives, is of interest not only for the family members. Prozhito project allows any user to explore the diaries data and gives huge research material for researchers of everyday life.
