The corpus includes the texts of birchbark letters from the East Slavic territory, as well as two lead letters found in Veliky Novgorod.

The corpus is the most complete and up-to-date set of linguistic information on the text of all the birchbark letters, available at the time of the last regular publication of the article on birchbark findings in the journal Voprosy yazykoznaniya. The corpus is fully synchronized with the database Old East Slavic birch bark letters (Gramoty.ru), both resources being annually updated.

The corpus features word-by-word morphological annotation informed by the index to Andrei Zalizniak's book Old Novgorod Dialect (2004 edition), which was programmatically applied to word forms in the texts of the letters included in this book. Furthermore, the results of the automatic markup were corrected and supplemented, and the texts not included in Zalizniak's book, including the letters found after 2003, were manually annotated according to this pattern.

The chronological range of the corpus of birchbark letters is 11-15 centuries. It thus overlaps both with the period of Old East Slavic (before 1400) and Middle Russian (15th century, to which a minority of the letters belong). The lemmas, following Zalizniak's example, reflect the changes in the extra short vowels (слати, день). 

In addition to the probable date when a letter was written, the metatextual annotation of the corpus also features the genre and type of text, the preservation of the letter, the city of the finding, the stratigraphic date, the archaeological site and the volume of the edition Novgorod letters on birch bark. According to these parameters, a subcorpus may be customized. Using a hyperlink, the metatextual annotation of each letter is linked to its page in the Gramoty.ru database.

Since 2021 the corpus of birchbark letters has become parallel: the Old East Slavic texts are aligned to translations to modern languages. Andrei Zalizniak's translations continued by Alexei Gippius and his colleagues were aligned where available. English translations by Roman Kovalev and Jos Schaeken have been added, covering a total of 337 letters (57 of them exist in two English versions). The annotation and search of the corpus are arranged similarly to the parallel corpora within the RNC. Parallelization of the corpus of birchbark letters allows one to find Old East Slavic correspondences of English and Russian lexemes and constructions (and vice versa), and also to search Old East Slavic lexicon by semantic fields.

The program implementation of automatic annotation is made by Timofey Arkhangelsky. Manual morphological annotation of the corpus was performed in the Morphy tool, developed by Arkhagelsky. The annotators were Ekaterina Mishina and Dmitri Sitchinava. The corpus was synchronized with the database and aligned with Russian and English translations by Anton Dyshkant and Dmitri Sitchinava.

Check out the list of scientific publications on the Birchbark letters corpus via the link: https://ruscorpora.ru/s/aAoxj. In the Publications section, use filters to find other types of publications about the corpus.