Photographic Archives of Ukrainian Observatories: Digitizing a Heritage

We describe a key project of the Ukrainian Virtual Observatory (UkrVO), namely, a collaboration to digitize the large collections of photographic plates that had been exposed during more than 100 years at Ukrainian observatories, and to combine the digitized images with CCD archives to form the UkrVO Joint Digital Archive. The application of flatbed scanners for digitizing plates is discussed.