Full collection of birch bark writings is available onlin

Thanks to Languagehat who wrote:

The site "Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts" has put online all the extant birchbark documents unearthed in Novgorod; as they say, this "will constitute a qualitative leap forward in the development of the study of birchbark documents by laying a reliable foundation for the further research into the texts and rendering the material accessible to an international medievalist audience of different backgrounds."

Unfortunately, this web-site is in Russian. It includes photographs of the writings, their text in ancient Russian and translations to modern Russian. They also write:

This web-site is a part of the system of the electronic resources being built, which will include the digital archive, a multifunctional database with full archaeological information about the birchbarks and a text corpus with lemmatization and morphological markup. The database will be available for download upon completion.

It is also possible to search for the inscriptions by period, city, site, genre and damage level.

We discussed this topic some time ago at Sima Qian Studio.:

55 years ago, on July, 26, 1951, the first birch-bark writing was found in Novgorod by Nina Akulova, a participant of the expedition led by Artemy Artsikhovsky. To celebrate the date, the Novgorod State Museum in collaboration with Moscow State University, Institute of Russian Language and other organizations are planning to launch a web-site that would feature the full collection of the found inscriptions (more than 1000), with photographs, translations and comments from historians. Initially, about 950 writings of XI-XV centuries will be published.The final date of the project is 2007. By that time, the web-site is to be finished and a CD will be published. Scientists from Cambridge, Leiden and Helsinki also participate in the project. Some of these writings are written by feudals, by their ministers or even peasants. There are barks written by men, women and children, who learned to write. Some of inscriptions made by a boy named Onthim, contain alphabet, simple drawings and simple texts (the pictures may be found on this page (text in Russian)). People wrote business and legal documents, notes, reminders, jokes... Only 3 or 4 of found inscriptions contain religious texts. Actually, everyone wrote everything. The society of the medieval Novgorod republic was almost 100% literate. The absolute majority of the writings are written in vernacular Old Novgorod dialect of Old Russian language. However, there is one, birch-bark letter 292, dated by the early XIII century, which is the oldest document ever written in a Finnic language. More samples of birch-bark letters may be found on the web-site of the Uni of Chicago, Slavic dept: Birch-bark letter photographs. See also an article at Stefan's Florilegium: Old Novgorod birch-bark writings.