FROM ARCHIVAL GOVERNANCE TO DIGITAL HERITAGE: SEMANTIC MODELLING AND DIGITISATION OF BULGARIAN ARCHIVAL INSTITUTIONS (1878-1912)

Abstract

The paper examines the institutional development of Bulgarian archival governance during the formative period of the modern Bulgarian state, from 1878 to 1912, and proposes a conceptual framework for its semantic modelling and digitisation. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the legal, administrative and documentary logic through which record-keeping and archival practices became part of the governance model after the Liberation. The methodology combines historical-institutional analysis with conceptual modelling. Normative acts, administrative regulations, procedural rules and institutional practices are interpreted as evidence of relations between administrative bodies, documentary processes, archival responsibilities and mechanisms of institutional continuity. The results identify a stable system of entities and relations: state and local institutions, archival units, regulatory instruments, document types and procedural actions such as creation, registration, classification, preservation and transfer. These components are transformed into a semantic framework that supports contextual description, structured metadata and interoperability with e-archives, digital repositories and knowledge infrastructures. The study concludes that early Bulgarian archival governance can be represented not only as a historical phenomenon, but also as a reusable digital heritage resource. The proposed model shifts the focus from document-level digitisation to system-level representation, preserving the institutional context in which documents were created and used. The paper recommends further technical implementation, validation with historical datasets, alignment with contemporary archival ontologies and the development of visualisation tools for administrative hierarchies and document flows. In this way, archival history contributes to access, research, education and the preservation of cultural memory in the digital age.