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