Gazety Rossii (1703 - 1917) database

There is a new database available from the site of the Russian National Library: Газеты России (1703 - 1917) The breadcrumbs look as follows: Главная > Ресурсы > Каталоги > Электронные каталоги > Каталоги периодических и продолжающихся изданий As of June 16, 2009 the database contained 6460 entries. The catalog is a result of cooperation between three major Russian libraries: The Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (РНБ), The Russian State Library (РГБ) [Moscow], and the State Public Historical Library (ГПИБ) [Moscow]. The extensive pre-revolutionary newspaper holdings of these libraries have heretofore been accessible only in part (and only through the use of Soviet-era catalogs in printed or microfilm form that are not widely held in Western libraries). The catalog is based on the holdings of the above libraries, as well as the holdings of the Research Library of Federal Archives (НБ ФА) [Moscow] and The Belinskii Sverdlovsk Regional Universal Research Library [Ekaterinburg] (СОУНБ). It contains bibliographic descriptions of all the newspapers published on the territory of the Russian Empire (within its 1913 borders) in the Russian language, from 1703-1917 inclusively. Additionally the catalog includes newspapers published in foreign cities containing large populations of the Russian diaspora: Lviv, Chernovtsy, and Kharbin. Included also are newspapers published by military units. The database allows for a title search which can be narrowed by specifying the place of publication. The search by year of publication is possible, for now, only for the first and last years of a newspaper’s run. The entries provide the following information: · Title of publication, following the title of the final issue. If a newspaper changed titles, these changes are reflected in the notes under "Загл.". · Information on the theme of the newspapers, its links to other publications, publishing bodies, editors or founders of the periodical. This information is based on the final edition of the paper. · The dates of the publication run and place of publication are also provided · Other information, such as the organization of the paper’s internal structure, changes in layout, possible breaks in publication, changes in language of the paper, etc. are included. If there were any indexes (ukazateli) and/or supplements to the paper, these are also reflected in the description. · For ease of ordering, call numbers assigned to the papers in РГБ and РНБ (or other holdings’ location information) are included. Holding institutions are marked by abbreviations: РНБ, РГБ, ГПИБ, НБ ФА, СОУНБ. This new online resource should save researchers a significant amount of time in identifying newspaper titles that may be useful for their research, and in identifying newspaper holdings in Russia, potentially superseding a number of older print sources. Since we haven’t had the chance to test the database extensively, we base the above on the description provided on the database website.

CEJSH -- THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

CEJSH -- THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES The journal, founded in 2004 publishes English abstracts of articles and reviews, which appeared mostly in the national languages in the Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak scientific journals devoted to social sciences and humanities. It is being sponsored by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences and Slovak Academy of Sciences. The service is hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling, Warsaw University (ICM UW) within the Virtual Library of Science (BWN). The journal is frequently updated and at this point contains some 11 557 abstracts from 209 scientific journals. The CEJSH covers the following disciplines: ANTHROPOLOGY ARCHAEOLOGY ARTS & ARCHITECTURE ECONOMICS (Business & Management) ETHNOLOGY EDUCATION HISTORY LAW & ADMINISTRATION LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE MEDIA & COMMUNICATION PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS PHILOSOPHY POLITICAL SCIENCES PSYCHOLOGY SOCIOLOGY SCIENCE OF SCIENCE THEOLOGY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES To seach, click on find publication or find editor source You can also search the Digital Library of the ASCR, contains full-text articles published by some of the journals of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Database Nauka Polska

Database Nauka Polska http://nauka-polska.pl/index.shtml This is an internet portal which showcases the database maintained by Ośrodek Przetwarzania Informacji since 1991. It is the most complete database of this type in Poland and is available free of charge. The previous version of the portal can be viewed under http://nauka.opi.org.pl The databases constituting the portal contain over 121, 000 records. The data are grouped in several sections: --information on Polish scholars (holders of PhD degrees, professors, etc.), living in Poland and abroad --information on Polish scholarly institutions of all types --information on scholarly research works, such as dissertations or post doctoral research articles. The contents, numbering over 100,000 records and backdated to 1999 and parallel the database SYNABA. --information on scholarly conferences, exhibitions, etc. --information on ongoing research projects To search a database, click on Szukaj which can be found in the upper right corner of the particular page. There is also a help section found under Pomoc. The database is continually updated.

Russian memoir sources digitized

I would like to recomment a website titled Universitas Personarum, which is maintained by the Moscow State University. The URL is: http://www.srcc.msu.su/uni-persona/ The site is dedicated to Russian memoir literature. Under the heading of Dnevniki i zapisnye knizhki, we find a series of full-text memoirs of several prominent Russian figures, mostly literary and cultural luminaries. More importantly, though, the heading Issledovaniia dnevnikovoi prozy leads to the digitized and searchable version of P.A. Zaionchkovskii's Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh. Unfortunately only the first three volumes have been scanned so far. (The website does not provide a reason for this, nor is it clear whether the remainder of the work will be put in digital format) The same link leads also to works by Mikhail Mikheev on the Soviet memoir literature of the 1930s and, Russian memoirists of the turn of the century, and others. The cite appears to be under construction and not all of the material is of equal weight and interest, but the digitized version of Zaionchkovskii, albeit incomplete, makes it worthwhile to visit.

Bulgarian Newspapers & Journals at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress' European Reading Room has recently added two valuable lists of serial publications from Bulgaria to their impressive array of digital resources, Bulgarian Newspapers at the Library of Congress and Bulgarian Journals at the Library of Congress. Both lists were compiled by the Bulgarian specialist at LC, Angela Cannon. These are not just lists of titles held. Each entry includes publication information, title changes, LC holdings and links to any online issues.

For those interested in the region, planning research in this country or abroad this is an extremely useful site.

Both the journal and newspaper pages include introductions with bibliographic guides to the topic. The entry information also indicates the format of the material, i.e., film or print, that is available.

SCIndex: Serbian citation index

SCIndex: Serbian citation index ( http://scindex.nb.rs/) contains over 21500 articles from 357 different Serbian journals from 2000. on, and in social sciences from 1991 on. It is useful for verification purposes, as long as one remembers to also check with National Library of Serbia's catalogs and databases when the citation you are looking for is not found on SCIndex.

Polish medical journals in full text

Termedia Publishing House http://www.termedia.pl/ publishes medical journals which might be of interest to those interested in international science publications. One can chose between an abstract or full text articles. Every article is in a PDF form, and available for free, one time registration is necessary. Journals are in English or in Polish language. Polish language journals are shown in parenthesis (PL).

Troubles with transliteration

In theory, it is a straightforward process to transliterate words (i.e., book titles) from a language that uses a non-Latin script (e.g., Russian, Serbian, Yiddish, Tajik, etc.) into Latin letters so that they can be searched and alphabetized properly in Western library catalogs. In practice, several competing systems of transliteration are in use, and they are not always consistently applied. This means that a library user must know which system(s) of transliteration are being used in a particular library catalog (or union catalog, database, search engine, portal, etc.) and repeat, vary, or truncate their searches accordingly.

Researchers may be familiar with examples such as

and

, but consider the title of the following newspaper, published in Moscow by the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880-1917:

1. Московскія церковныя вѣдомости

(pre-1918 & émigré Russian orthography, as it actually appeared)

2. Московские церковные ведомости

(post-1918 Russian orthography, commonly found in footnotes)

3. Moskovskīi︠a︡ t︠s︡erkovnyi︠a︡ vi︠e︡domosti

(ALA-Library of Congress transliteration of #1)

4. Moskovskie t︠s︡erkovnye vedomosti

(ALA-Library of Congress transliteration of #2)

5. Moskovskija cerkovnyja vjedomosti

(DIN transliteration of #1--this system is commonly used in Germany)

6. Moskovskie cerkovnye vedomosti

(DIN transliteration of #2)

7. Moskovskìâ cerkovnyâ vědomosti

(ISO transliteration of #1--this system is commonly used in E. Europe)

8. Moskovskie cerkovnye vedomosti

(ISO transliteration of #2)

(Note: if the diacritical marks in the above examples are not displaying correctly, it may be because your web browser does not recognize the characters. For more on this problem, see below; for a more accurate view of the diacritics, try viewing this page in Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.)

From 1869 to 1879, this newspaper was published under the title Московскія епархиальныя вѣдомости. The second word of this title provides another good example of the variation that must be taken into account when searching North American and European library catalogs. (The orthographies/transliterations appear in the same order as in the previous example.)

1. епархиальныя

2. епархиальные

3. eparkhialʹnyi︠a︡

4. eparkhialʹnye

5. eparchialʹnyja

6. eparchialʹnye

7. eparhialʹnyâ

8. eparhialʹnye

In order to perform a comprehensive online search (encompassing, for example, WorldCat, Karlsruhe KVK, The European Library, and RIBK), all of these permutations must be used. Leibniz Universität Hannover has posted a table of the major transliteration systems at http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/ntr/russisch/umschrifttabelle.html which is useful for the post-1918 Russian alphabet, but unfortunately does not include pre-1918/émigré letters such as

PDF files containing transliteration systems, brief explanatory notes, and references for dozens of languages are available at http://transliteration.eki.ee/, although the compiler stresses that his work is not meant to be taken as authoritative.

In recent years, some library catalogs in Western Europe and North America have developed the ability to display non-Latin titles and other bibliographic information in the original script (usually accompanied by a transliterated version). Thus it is possible in a very limited number of cases to dispense with transliteration systems altogether, and conduct searches directly in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc. At the present time, however, only a tiny fraction of Western library catalog records include this information, so users will continue to need to transliterate their search terms for the foreseeable future.

Two other facts should also be noted: 1) In general, the diacritical marks that accompany some transliterated letters (i.e., ĭ, ž, i︠a︡ , etc.) can be ignored when searching. For example, "okti︠a︡ brʹskiĭ" (the ALA-LC version of "октябрьский") may simply be entered as "oktiabrskii", and "âŝik" (the ISO version of "ящик") can be searched as "asik". 2) The interaction between various encoding systems often causes diacritical marks to display incorrectly when printed, e-mailed, or otherwise viewed by any means other than that by which they were entered (even the diacritics in this post may not display correctly on all computers, and several of them had to be converted into image files just to enable this post to be published). For example, "Kievskai︠a︡" might appear as "Kievskai?a?", "Kievskaikila", "Kievskain+áan+í", "", "Kievskaiï¸ a︡",

"Kievskai&# 65056;a&# 65057;",

, or other unhelpful combinations. This is also true of languages (German, French, Czech, etc.) that are written in the Latin script but include phonetically-significant diacritics such as

which may appear as strange symbols, Greek letters, or shapes when cut and pasted into Word documents, e-mail messages, etc.

Looking for information on current Russian serials?

Serial publications can be difficult to track if you don't have a large library nearby. One site that can help is Media Guide. While this is not a comprehensive list, there is information on over 2600 titles. What is available here is a bit unpredictable. For example, there is an extensive entry on Uchitel'skaia Gazeta but nothing for Knizhnoe Obozrenie. The entries include statistical data on web usage, publication history, tirazh, contact information and much more. Much of the information here is meant for advertisers but certainly has other applications.

The search interface allows you to search by a variety of features including type of publication, cost, periodicity, place of publication, title, etc.

Entries supply links to the main page for the publication and contact information for the editors.

Have you looked at feb-web.ru lately?

Have you looked at feb-web.ru lately? This is a cite where frequent checks really are useful. Recently the full text of Masanov's pseudonym dictionary as well as the best reference sources for periodicals have all been added. The image to the left shows some of the sources/categories of sources available. Highlighted are the links to Masanov's dictionary and the periodical resources. The complete text, fully searchable, is available for these sources.

The pseudonym dictionary is more than just a list of author's and their pseudonyms as it includes in many cases the publications and dates when a particular pseudonym was used.

The periodical bibliographies included here are:

Русская периодическая печать, 1702—1894. — 1959 Русская периодическая печать, 1895 — октябрь 1917. — 1957 Лисовский. Библиография русской периодической печати, 1703—1900 гг.: Материалы для истории русской журналистики: В 2 кн. Библиография периодических изданий России, 1901—1916 Сводный каталог сериальных изданий России, 1801—1825.

If you are seeking information on periodical publications from the pre-revolutionary period this will be the best site to consult. The nature of the information in each of these sources, and its organization varies quite alot. So while Lisovskii's bibliography is probably the most comprehensive list of titles, Русская периодическая печать includes the most detailed descriptions of the type of material included in each publication. Библиография периодических изданий России Rossii is the most comprehensive list of titles for the late imperial period and has the added advantage of an index volume with a subject list. Also, each of its entries include the issues that were published for each year and their volume/issue numbers.

The final title in this list has yet to be scanned for the project.

The Russian National Library scanned the card catalog of its Armenian-language holdings

The Russian National Library scanned the card catalog of its Armenian-language holdings (over 64,000 items) and made it available online some time ago. They recently added part of their Georgian card catalog (from ა through დუმბაძე) as well, which will contain records for over 100,000 items when fully mounted. While many of the cards include Russian versions of the titles and authors' names, these cannot serve as access points since the full text of the cards is not searchable (unlike the State Public Scientific- Technical Library's scanned card catalog, where this kind of thing can be done). This means that search terms must be entered in Armenian or Georgian script, respectively. It also means that search capabilities are limited to browsing the portion of the Armenian or Georgian alphabetical order where the search term (i.e., an author's surname or the first word of a title or institution) may appear as the first word on the card (i.e., as the main entry), just as if one was standing in front of an actual card catalog and flipping through the cards one by one. Nevertheless, this is a major resource for scholars of the south Caucasus, as it provides access to the National Library's monographic holdings in these languages dating from the early 17th century to the present. General records for serials (without holdings information) are also included, and the Georgian catalog also includes records for avtoreferaty of dissertations.

Records for individual articles in the Kazakh and Georgian National Libraries

Records for individual articles in the Kazakh and Georgian National Library's online catalogs The National Library of Kazakhstan (http://www.nlrk.kz/) only has records for a fraction of its holdings online, but among those it does have are tens and tens of thousands of records for individual newspaper articles, journal articles, and individual papers from published conference proceedings, dating back to at least 1949. It is not clear how comprehensive the coverage is, especially for earlier years, but the value of having these records online is obvious, both for researchers and for librarians seeking to verify citations. Russian-language and Kazakh-language materials must be searched separately, the former in "Казахстан: прошлое и настоящее (рус)", and the latter in "Казахстан: прошлое и настоящее (каз)". These databases can be selected at http://212.13.133.56/. The keyword search does not appear to function properly, and some of the other search capabilities may not work as well as they might, but this is nevertheless a huge benefit to scholars and librarians. The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia also has a large number of records for individual articles online, including records for over 30,000 Georgian-language newspaper articles dating from 1852 to 1912 (http://www.nplg.gov.ge/ec/search.php?lang=en&db=pera). Several other article databases are listed at http://www.nplg.gov.ge/ec/changedb.php?lang=en&refurl=%2Fec%2Fsearch.php. Other national libraries in the region have recently begun to do some cataloging at the article level, as certain Eastern European libraries began to do several years ago. This is a welcome trend.

Retrospective resources at Knizhnaia Palata

Knizhnaia Palata www.bookchamber.ru The Russian Book Chamber has been a source of bibliographic information in print and electronic form for many years. They have now added some new retrospective resources to their current online searches that could be of interest to scholars. They have recently added several databases that provide online, free access to the books formerly only listed in print in Knizhnaia Letopis or electronically via the scanned catalog at the Russian National Library. There are two databases in particular that will be of interest to those seeking Russian language materials of the early Soviet period: the national bibliography for 1917-1930 and the national bibliography for 1939-45.

Internet Usage World Statistics

Internet Usage World Statistics http://www.internetworldstats.com/ The current interest in Internet usage makes this a very useful site, at least for comparative purposes. The statistics here largely come from the United Nations. When compared with many of the stats coming out of ISI Emerging Markets. It is a fairly thorough listing of statistics for most countries of the region. There are also links for numerous supporting sites here.

Russian Union catalog

Union Catalogs are always changing. One of the Russian sites that is really useful is the RIBK (Russian Library Information Consortium). The search mechanism sends queries to the Russian State Library, the National Library, Moscow University Library, the Rudomino Foreign Language Library and the Parliamentary Library. Many of the individual databases of these libraries are available via the interface as well.

Bibliographic Management Tools

We are sometimes asked by our patrons about the various bibliographic management tools available on the market, such as RefWorks, Endnote, etc. I pulled together a few links that give a good background regarding the subject of bibliographic software. The pages I link to range from very in-depth ones, some of which are continuously updated, to quick overviews, some in easy to read table form.

Here is a Berkeley site with nice tutorials, in depth descriptions of each program, FAQs and more. Discussed are EndNote, RefWorks, QUOSA, and Reference Manager.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PUBL/endnote.html

There is also this detailed side by side comparison of several programs including RefWorks, Biblioscape, Bookends, Library Master, ProCite, EndNote, Reference Manager, and Papyrus:

http://www.burioni.it/forum/ors-bfs/text/6e12400-42.html

Tufts also has a nice page comparing Endnote, RefWorks, and Reference Manager.

http://www.library.tufts.edu/hsl/education/endnote_refworks.html

For an overview at a glance here is everything about the main features of the programs put together in one big table (from a University of Washington page). Compared are: RefWorks, Endnote, Procite, and Reference Manager.

http://healthlinks.washington.edu/howto/citation_tools_comparison.pdf

Czech publications on history post 1990

http://biblio.hiu.cas.cz/english.html

The database BIBLIO is a working database of the Bibliographical department of the Library of the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It contains monographs and articles in periodicals and collections of historical orientation published after the year 1990, with the bohemian character (Czech author, Czech topic, published in the Czech Republic). The database serves as a groundwork for the publishing of the yearbook Bibliography of the History of the Czech Lands.

The archaeological records and records with Slovak topic are included only selectively, because they are processed in the Library of Archaeological Institute in Prague and in the Bibliographical Department of Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

The meaning of the abbreviations of the excerpted periodicals and collections you can find at the bottom of pages with the found records. Complete list is here.

Number of records in database: 110 979 Date of the last update: 23. 4. 2007

Lexinfosys-Great source for Central Asian legal information

Another useful legal source Lexinfosys. This one is focused on Central Asia. URL:

http://www.cis-legal-reform.org/indexdb.asp?langi=eng

Each of the numbers here represents a subject category. You can get a list of the categories by clicking Show. Lots of translation, Russian and vernacular language materials.

World Law Guide for post-Soviet legislation

World Law Guide http://www.lexadin.nl/wlg/legis/nofr/legis.php Really nice source for legislation from the post-Soviet period. Quite a bit in translation and a section on each page of legal sources

Estonian National Library

Estonian National Library URL: http://www.nlib.ee/ The library catalog here allows access to citations for: Items (books, periodicals, sheet music, maps, sound recordings) acquired by the Tallinn libraries of the ELNET consortium JOURNAL ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN ESTONIA BOOKS PUBLISHED IN ESTONIA regardless of the language of publication. PERIODICALS PUBLISHED IN ESTONIA (regardless of the language). FOREIGN BOOKS issued after 1992 and (data on books published in Cyrillic is missing) - information comes from the union catalogue of foreign books. FOREIGN BOOKS published before 1992 and obtained by the National Library from (regardless of the language).

National Bibliography and National Libray acces as Subject Bibliography?

If you have ever struggled with research to compile a comprehensive list of publications on a topic it might be worth your time to reexamine the national bibliographies of Eastern Europe in their electronic manifestations. In the East European nations in particular, some of these sources are really remarkable!

MAK w WWW Polish National Bibliography Online Searchable by author, title, subject, series title, and keyword. The online bibliography includes records from 1976-

LIBIS Lithuanian National Library Catalog While not truly the bibliography it is an excellent source for current publications and does contain brief records for very recent materials that are on order. There is also an article search available from this interface.

Latvian National Bibliography - Aleph main menu National Bibliography of Latvia Online The National Bibliography online includes the monograph and periodical sections and has a very comprehensive search structure. Collections will often have their contents listed

Magyar Nemzeti Bibliogr�fia - K�nyvek Bibliogr�fi�ja Hungarian National Bibliography This site includes the last 4-5 issues of the Hungarian National Bibliography. There is a general subject guide that reflects the organizaiton of the printed bibliography.

Bulgarian National Library Bulgarian National Library with a variety of sources available including the following: Машинен каталог на български и чуждестранни книги Своден каталог на чуждестранните периодични издания в България (1984 - ) Своден каталог на чуждестранните книги (1995 - Статии от българските списания, вестници и сборници

NKC Online katalog a bibliograficka baze Narodni knihovny CR Czech National Bibliography The bibliography online includes records from the cd version of the bibliography. Like the cd, the web version is divided into databases for articles, books, "Foreign Bohemica", dissertations, periodicals, authority records and "Special Materials".

NSK - National Bibliography Croatian National Bibliography online. The series on mongraphs, periodicals and articles are all available at this site. There is retrospective depth to at least 1999 for all materials.