Mary Zirin's Bibliography of Pre-Revolutionary Writings by Women

We are excited to announce that Annabella Irvine and Sveta Stoytcheva of the Slavic Reference Service recently completed an online database of Mary Zirin's Bibliography of Pre-Revolutionary Writings by Women. Mary Zirin gave her bibliography to the Slavic Reference Service in 2009. The database allows researchers to search for works in her bibliography by keyword, title, and author, among other fields. Mary is a longtime supporter of the Slavic Reference Service and patron of the service’s Summer Research Lab. The website is intended to honor her work, as well as make it available to other researchers interested in Russian women writers.

About the Database

The database contains over 3,000 entries of authors from the time period, their bibliography, and references. Included in the bibliography are any fiction OR one nonfiction work of at least ten pages OR two poems; with some exceptions for works of special interest to women.  It does not include authors that appear in the following standard reference works: Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Volume II: Russia, the Non-Russian Peoples of the Russian Federation, and the Successor States of the Soviet Union, and Russkie pisateli 1800-1917. Biograficheskii slovar'.

To assist scholars with archival research, this database contains references (whenever possible) to personal archives from Lichnye arkhivnye fondy v gosudarstvennykh khranilishchakh SSSR. Ukazatel'.

About Mary Zirin

Within the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Mary Fleming Zirin stands out as a beacon of strength and hope to students, faculty, librarians, and independent scholars. It is impossible to summarize Mary’s extraordinary contributions to the development of Slavic and East European Women’s Studies. As a bibliographer, Mary introduced significant number of scholarly sources on women and gender, which are now standards in the field. These include Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), Women & Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007), and Women East-West Current Bibliography through the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.  Her tireless advocacy on behalf of independent scholars, who are in constant need of access to collections and services, continues to this day.

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.