12/04/2008

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.

11/14/2008

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.

Slovenian Library Online

Slovenian Library Online (Digitalna knjiznica Slovenije) is a portal with collection of key scientific and scholarly journals. The portal offers the full searchable text and also provides a search by bibliographic data. Availability of specific journal issues depends on publishers. http://www.dlib.si/vsebina_eng.asp?id=zbirke Articles are available as PDF documents and also as a html preview.

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).

10/17/2008

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 "ŝik" (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.

10/15/2008

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.

7/03/2008

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.

6/19/2008

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.

1/31/2008

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.