The motivations and results from the first 1.5-year period of the project "Wide-field Plate Database (WFPDB): Development and Access via Internet" (DO-02-273/18.12.2008), approved for funding through a competition held by the Bulgarian National Science Fund in the field of Promotion of Research in Priority Areas, are described. The main direction of the development of the project is digitization and preservation of, and web access to, the astronomical plate archives of the 2-m RCC and the 50/70

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... cm Schmidt telescopes of the Rozhen National Astronomical Observatory received in the period 1979-1998. The basis of the work is set out in Tsvetkov (2006) [1] and Tsvetkova & Tsvetkov (2006) [2], motivating the project over the past 10 years. The WFPDB (www.wfpdb.org) represents a unique virtual instrument in astronomical research, which allows obtaining information on existing astronomical observations of celestial objects over the past 130 years with the professional astronomical telescopes ACM Computing Classification System (1998): J.2.