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.