Abstract:

History has always been subjected to political pressure. It is often falsified in order to legitimize various political ideas, to mould mass notions and even identity. This is particularly true for today’s information society and is becoming rather easy to undertake. It is sufficient to make a simple search in order to land on hundreds and thousands of websites promoting historical myths and mystifications. Therefore, the same findings apply to the main sources of information that serve as a material for professional historical research – archival documents. They are subject to counterfeiting too. The idea behind this is perfectly clear – on the basis of such false documents can be produced historical research pretending to claim scholarly quality and genuineness.

The purpose of this report is to present several examples from Bulgaria of forgery of documents of and on national heroes and to outline measures on how this forgery in digital environment can be effectively counteracted and if not prevented completely, to be identified and restricted.

First, the paper emphasizes the role of the institutions from the so-called GLAM sector, which should provide on the Internet the most detailed information about their documentary collections and thus serve as a reliable corrective and reveal or denounce falsified historical sources.

Second, the paper will examine the method of work of a newly created “Information Portal for Archival-Documentary Heritage of the Bulgarian Revival” on how to report such false documents on the Internet and how to separate the authentic information from the false. For this purpose, a methodology has been developed to grade the reliability of the information that will be shared in the portal. It is important for users to be aware that they have access to genuinely existing authentic documents from the period of the Revival, which are stored in the relevant institutions and / or private collections. They should not be misled and should receive at least an indication if there is any suspicion or if the information is shared from an unreliable source.

Keywords:

History and false history, documents and false documents, digitisation, ICT.