Providing Digital Access to Slavic General Reference Materials

The Collection

The Slavic Reference Service is responsible for the non-circulating reference collection of materials covering Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. Previously organized by general geographic region, the Slavic Reference Service has reorganized its reference collection by country. This collection includes the following sections: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and General Slavic, East Europe, and Eurasia.

The General Slavic, East Europe, and Eurasia Collection contains a variety of materials. The reference materials include indexes, bibliographies, biographies, encyclopedias, transcription materials, transliteration and Romanization tables, dictionaries, museum and archive guides, law reference, and atlases. These materials cover large geographic regions, different ethnic groups, and general Slavic topics that transcend country lines and their borders. Access to vital information from these sources is now digitally available: Slavic Collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

The Project

Slavic Reference Service Graduate Assistant, Kevin Adams, digitized the title pages, introductions, and table of contents of each monograph and serial in the General Slavic Collection. These scans were compiled and curated on the digital publishing platform, Scalar. The scans are meant to provide a snapshot of the contents in this collection, and can help patrons identify articles or chapters that may be of interest to them. This digital publication is titled Slavic Collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

The digital content and publishing platform, Scalar, allows patrons to browse the collection as it appears on the shelf by call number. Because this is a quite extensive collection, call numbers are divided into three sections. The Table of Contents for the General Slavic Reference Collection allows patrons to quickly identify the areas of the virtual shelf that they would like to browse.

Highlights

One of the most popular monographs in the General Slavic Collection is Women & Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia (Volumes 1 &2). The now digitized Table of Contents, allows scholars to consult the encyclopedic content of these volumes, in order to identify the chapters or articles that may be of interest to them.

Less popular, but equally useful and interesting are two volumes: ThePeriodical Publications of the Jewish Labour and Revolutionary Movements in Easternand Southeastern Europe 1877-1916 and EastEuropean Peasantries: Social Relations: An Annotated Bibliography of PeriodicalArticles. These volumes are both extremely helpful reference sources for identifying newspaper articles that are otherwise sparsely indexed. Now that the Tables of Contents have been digitized, scholars will be able to identify if these volumes will be helpful for their research.