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.