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This paper examines the character, structure, and fate of the archive of the Russian military attaché in Japan. This investigation describes the multidimensional and complex nature of the archive, incorporating several independent volumes of documents associated mostly with activities surrounding Russian supply commissions in Japan from 1914 to 1921. The author highlights the crucial role of the Russian All-Military Union in saving the historical records of the Russian Army and emphasizes that these activities, ignored until now in the description of existing collections, constitute an important contextual background of the archive that symbolically reflects the drama of Russian postrevolutionary epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recounts the details of the purchase of the historian E. A. Presniakov's Russian library by the Columbia University Library in 1930 and gives a general description of its components and significance. It uses the library as the basis for a general assessment of the breadth and depth of Presniakov historical contributions, concluding that the originality of insight and interpretation place him among a number of great prerevolutionary historians. The lateness of his professional development, culminating after the Bolshevik seizure of power and during the vicissitudes of the 1920s, and then his early death by cancer have deprived him of that recognition. This paper describes and assesses his major works on medieval Russia, the Lithuanian-Russian state and Ukraine, as well as his late writings on nineteenth century monarchs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on three important Library of Congress staff members from the period 1941–2015 to describe the library's interaction with Russia and the Soviet Union and the buildup of the library's Russian and Soviet collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video appeals to the president of Russia are a primary source of unprecedented richness for the study of various aspects of contemporary Russian life. Online videos are recorded by diverse groups and individuals in Russia as attempts to prompt President V.V. Putin to directly resolve specific social, economic, cultural, and environmental problems; and to express opinions on a variety of issues or to wish him well. The content of this material and its role as a historical source can be compared to epistolary archives and, specifically, letters to the authorities written by Soviet citizens. This paper describes an experimental project in collecting, preserving, and providing access to these videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitization of archival materials and finding aids can potentially become a powerful tool to provide information about and access to archival collections. This paper discusses the status of digitization of archival materials generally and applies this to the specific case of Russian materials. Digitization can offer benefits for both researcher and archivist, by making documents or finding aids available online, limiting the need to travel or handle delicate papers. However, it is an expensive process and much work needs to be done to ensure protection of intellectual property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the growth of the Muslim press in Russia, its consolidation, and its survival during the Soviet Period, followed by its revival in the early 1990s. Although by no means comprehensive in scope, it is a necessary step in beginning to shed light on this under-researched topic. These unique publishing cultures represent outlets for freedom of expression, even in controlled cultural spaces, and document the intellectual protest among Muslim communities in Russia. Understanding the contributions of various Muslim publishing centres is critical to gaining a broader view of Russian and Soviet Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reports on her trip to Moscow and Uzbekistan. In Moscow she attended and presented a paper at the conference Rumiantsevskie chteniia [Rumiantsev readings] 2013. After the conference she set up a new approval plan for Yale University Libraries with Natasha Kozmenko Booksellers. In Tashkent she participated in the seventh international conference Information and Library Resources for Science, Education, Culture, and Business: Central Asia 2013. She and some of the other participants also traveled to Samarkand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the Russian library system's current landscape and outlines its relationship with electronic technologies and Internet technologies in particular. The author discusses Google projects in Russia, and then analyzes possibilities for more substantial and elaborate Google activities in the Russian and CIS library and information sector. The paper concludes with specific project proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper summarizes the ninth annual conference of the Russian Library Association in May 2004. Included are the exhibits, several plenary addresses, the work of the Bibliography Section, and election results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provokes a discussion on such important topics as the heritage of "Russia Abroad," the history and evolution of the official communist and post-communist government efforts to retrieve archival Rossica, and the importance of respecting the professional archival distinction between "provenance" and "pertinance." It also discusses restitution issues in general and the destiny of several trophy libraries and archives in particular. The emphasis, however, is to coordinate the efforts in description and preservation of all Russian archival materials, whether in Russia or abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the complex ethnic situation in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union as seen by Russian émigrés. Observers from many political perspectives identified that, whereas ethnic minorities often had a relatively well-developed sense of national identity within the empire/union, "Russia" was relatively undeveloped in terms of self-identification. This paradox affected both Soviet policy and émigré observers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reports on a study conducted to determine the extent to which foreign (non-Russian) studies in library and information science for the 1996-1998 period were covered by Russian indexing and abstracting in librarianship. The conclusion is that much relevant material in the library literature-particularly that published in Western Europe and North America-is missed by the Russian abstracting and indexing processes. The paper concludes with comments on the state of Russian librarianship in the post-Soviet period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors discuss the recent rise of the Internet in Russia, its use by Russian librarians, and networks of libraries that have developed over the past decade in Russia. The paper provides addresses for a number of Internet sites in the area of librarianship, education, and culture in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) Library has been collecting materials on the Russian Far North since 1934. Publications were obtained mainly through exchanges and from one main purchase supplier. After 1991, these channels became increasingly ineffective with the demise of the British book supplier, lack of resources of Russian exchange partners, and enormous problems with book publishing and distribution in Russia. However, this period also coincided with an increase in foreign research activities in this region and the development of a significant group of researchers working on the Russian Far North at SPRI. This provided opportunities for acquiring materials directly from research institutes and local book shops. There are also several new vendors in America and Europe who focus on different regional centers and are quite competitive. Based on the experience of working closely with researchers and using book vendors, the author discusses the problems of acquiring material published in the region, the impact on the library collection's profile, and the benefits of using these various channels. The author also relates the recent experience of researchers trying to acquire material on SPRI's behalf while on field trips in Russia's regions, including Sakhalin, Magadan, Noril'sk, and Iakutsk. The paper also discusses the need to be selective in the acquisitions process, to consider the users of the collection, and to take into account regional collections of other similar libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is now undisputed that information resources freely available on U.S. Internet sites can be valuable for answering appropriate ready reference inquiries. Such resources range from online directories (Switchboard.com and others) to online encyclopedias (Brittanica.com and others). How valuable are freely available Russian Internet resources for use in answering similar kinds of ready reference inquiries? This article makes an assessment by looking at a number of specific examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including an article on the Russian collections in the U.S., one by Tatjana Lorkovic on the role of Joel Sumner Smith in starting the Russian collection at the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut, and one by Patricia Polansky on the development of the Russian collections at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Though well known for its historical and political collections, the Hoover Institution Library also has a small but valuable collection of books and periodicals on Russian art, which was collected by Professor Frank Golder in the Soviet Union in 1925. The collection consists basically of items from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on subjects ranging from painting to illustrated travel accounts. It also includes some older books with unusual bindings of considerable value, some of which are from imperial libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author describes his participation in a conference in Krasnoiarsk on Gennadii Vasil'evich Iudin; in a meeting in Moscow on the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection of color photographs; and in a meeting on Russian emigre publications at the Russkoe zarubezh'e [Russian emigration] library in Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reprints selected excerpts from Wojciech Zalewski's contribution to the first volume in the Bowker-Saur's short-lived Area Studies Guides series. This volume summarized recent research on the former Soviet Union in ten broad subject areas, such as land and people, history, the economy, society and culture, government and politics, science and technology, business, and general reference. International specialists in each field reviewed key titles and authors and provided extensive, annotated bibliographies. This excerpt omits Zalewski's list of “general reference” works, concentrating instead on the author's prescient comments about the transformative effects of computerization on the field of bibliography in general, and Soviet area studies in particular. In the conclusion to his brief survey of the state of the field on the eve of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Stanford's Slavic curator adumbrates the necessity of developing “new bibliographical skills” and notes (but does not expand upon) the link between this enumerative bibliography and the class on Slavic bibliography that provided its actual raison d'etre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the contents of a substantial and little-known collection of Russian Civil War photographs currently held at the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. The images come from the personal archive of General Robert L. Eichelberger (1886-1961), Assistant Chief of Staff, Operations Division, and Chief Intelligence Officer with the American Expeditionary Forces in eastern Siberia, 1918-1920. The article analyzes the scholarly research value of this collection, which has been scanned as part of the Duke University Libraries digital collections project called Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Muslim population grows in Russia, and along with it questions of radical Islam and the role of Islam in Russian society and government, it has become increasingly important for scholars, students, and policy makers to be able to conduct research effectively on the presence of Islam in Russia. English-language literature devoted to the topic is infrequent and often difficult to locate and access. This research guide points to important and recent books, reference works, periodicals, periodical databases, Internet resources, electronic discussion lists, and scholarly organizations to help identify relevant quality research material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is not yet a comprehensive overview of online sources about Slavic emigration to America, despite the vast amount of information available on this topic. The author has selected a number of useful sites on emigration from Russia, and reviews and analyzes them here. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Riazan', like the rest of Russia, has seen a large increase in publishing activity, including newspapers and magazines. Subjects covered in the press are also much more varied than under communism. The most popular topics now relate to business, education and themes traditionally of interest to women. Of particular interest to researchers are materials concerning local and regional subjects. The Riazan' Regional Library has maintained a classified union catalog of local materials in libraries of the region since 1947. It covers the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. Inadequate funding for the last several years has meant almost no book acquisitions in Riazan' libraries. What money there is has been focused on serials in an attempt to satisfy readers' needs for current information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The single most difficult situation publishers have faced since the depression and hyperinflation of 1991-1993 was the financial crisis which began on August 17, 1998. Prior to August 17, Russian publishers were on track to produce a record number of titles. After August 17, production plummeted. Yet by March of 1999 the industry was reviving, and as of May production had returned roughly to pre-crisis levels. The August crisis was a severe test for the publishing industry, but the rapid recovery demonstrates its vitality. The authors discuss monographs primarily, but serials are also included. They also explain why caution is necessary when using official Russian publishing statistics since 1991 and how such statistics can still be useful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article discusses the University of California-Berkeley's collection of select rare books from Imperial Russia and its predecessor states while relating this tracing to the history of printing in Russia. For this case study, a sample of pre-Petrine era and early Imperial Russian books that were published before 1800 was gathered and analyzed for the subject distribution. This article provides some historical background on how this collection evolved over the history of UC Berkeley. The collection was also analyzed based on Old Church Slavonic and Russian along with the places of imprints within the Russian Empire. The purpose of this case study was to document the rare books from pre-Imperial and Imperial Russia while providing the ancillary yet useful information about the Russian Studies collection development at UC Berkeley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harold M. Leich's outstanding service as a Slavic librarian from 1969 to 2019 earned him the Distinguished Service Award of the Committee on Libraries and Information Resources, delivered during the 2019 annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). He began as a cataloger at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where six years later he was promoted to Librarian for Slavic and East European Acquisitions. From 1987 until retirement he served at the Library of Congress as Russian Area Specialist. For his last 20 years there he also served as the specialist for Modern Greek. He assisted Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and noted scholar of Russia, with many projects. Over his career, Leich produced more than 50 publications, mostly concerning Russian materials, but also on Modern Greek collections as well as on book matters relating to other countries. He participated on many ASEEES committees, and he also served on committees for the American Library Association, the Modern Greek Studies Association, and other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article describes the life of the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia (1853–1920) through the correspondence with her parents: the Emperor of Russia Alexander II, the Empress and close friends. The accent is on Grand Duchess's life in Great Britain after her marriage in 1874 to Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (1844–1900), second son of the Queen Victoria but also about her life in the Duchies of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha after 1893 with frequent visits to her family in Russia. The letters give us important information about the Grand Duchess's life, her children, and her social contacts with political and diplomatic circles of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We may not think of Russia as an advanced information society with open access to its scholarship, but it is. The Russian Electronic Library at elibrary.ru offers us twenty-eight million academic journal articles, essays in edited volumes, book reviews, and other texts from all disciplines, many of them in PDF full text and free to download. All of Russia's periodical scholarship is open to the world in elibrary.ru. Just one keyword search, for "Чешская республика" [Czech Republic], brings us 863 results, 372 of them (forty-three percent) in full text. We can find much more writing about Czech subjects with other search terms, but even this single corpus of 863 results shows us the diversity of scholars, interests, and perspectives in Russia on the Czech Republic and the Czech people in the past and present. The Russian Electronic Library can help us reduce ethnocentrism in Czech studies. It gives us open access to a diverse and unfolding scholarship outside the Czech Republic, the European Union and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important resources for social and family historians researching the former Russian Empire are the revision lists, a series of ten enumerations of the population conducted between 1719 and 1858. Listing the members of each household among taxable classes of people across the Russian Empire, the revision lists are useful for studying historical population demographics and reconstructing family relationships. An awareness of these records and where to access them can be useful for Slavic librarians to facilitate the research of Russian historians and genealogists. This article provides an overview of the history and content of the revision lists with a survey of available collections online and offline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author recalls her professional relationship and close, personal friendship with Katia Genieva, the long-time director of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces readers and scholars interested in Russian art, considered broadly, to collections housed at one of the major repositories in the United States, Stanford University Libraries (SUL), with the adjacent Hoover Institution Library (although it concentrates on SUL). In general, the two collections complement each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors provide a brief history of the firm now called East View Information Services. From its beginning in 1989 as a sole-proprietorship company, it has grown from microfilming the back file of a single Soviet journal to being a subscription agent, book vendor, database aggregator, provider of maps and other geospatial information, and more—from Slavic countries, East Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of the Russian collection at the Library of Congress during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Library of Congress, which was intended to be a small legislative library, initially added books about Russia in English translation and on limited subjects. The purchase of the Jefferson library brought the first Russian-language books to the collection, but the Russian collection would not truly begin to grow until the 1866 Smithsonian Deposit and the development of international exchanges in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The author made heavy use of the many printed Library of Congress catalogs and supplements, as well as archival sources, in the course of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an inventory of Russian digital collections that was gathered from publically available material on the Web in 2011. It touches on the opportunities and difficulties that come with the increase of digital material on the Web and how librarians can attempt to bring smaller collections to the attention of scholars and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a review of twelve bibliographies that reflect the holdings of the Russian collection in Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii focusing on Siberia, the Soviet/Russian Far East, and Russia in Asia and the Pacific, especially Russians in China. The chosen titles represent a mixture of the great, the average, and not-so-good that the author has used over the past four decades. While there is a question about the usefulness of bibliographies in this digital age, most of the old standards should still play a role in academic scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author discusses her 2008 trip to the Russian Far East (Vladivostok and Khabarovsk), visiting libraries, publishers, bookstores, scholars, and others involved with research and activities of interest to librarians. Scholars interested in the Russian Far East will find descriptions of the two main ones in Vladivostok. Observations are from 1996 and 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author investigates Alexander S. Gumberg's (1887-1939) pioneering role in the development of US-Soviet print relations between 1917 and 1930. The article is based on analysis of records from Gumberg's personal archive and has two parts. The first considers Gumberg's collection of documents concerning the founding of the Soviet state in revolutionary Russia, their presentation in the American press, and their deposit in the New York Public Library. The second examines Gumberg's establishment of bilateral exchanges of print materials in the 1920s and offers insights into their theoretical and practical aspects from American and Soviet perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a preliminary summary of the results of a huge study of reading among urban high school students (ages 14-17) in many regions of Russia. It considers such aspects of the topic as: the place of reading in the structure of high school students' life plans and leisure activities; their motives for reading, their preferences, and the amount they read; the level of their culture of reading and information seeking; and the influence of family, peers, libraries, and the Internet on their reading habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to a segment of the Russian literary market that is underrepresented in American research library collections, namely light popular fiction and particularly the titles that belong to the detektiv genre. The results of an informal survey of scholars and bibliographers are presented and collection patterns are briefly discussed. Following an exposition of the available collection development tools for Russian light fiction, the article concludes with a call for greater emphasis on collecting these materials in North American research libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the origins and functionality of a UK-based, government-sponsored, online subject gateway to Web sites about Russia and Eastern Europe. The Intute project relies on subject specialists to select, evaluate, and describe the links featured on its Web site. It also includes a Virtual Training Suite, which contains subject-based online tutorials (including languages and European Studies) that students can use to help them search the Internet more effectively and to evaluate what they find. The authors offer a realistic yet hopeful assessment of the future of post-Soviet Slavic studies in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the Slavic studies research guides found on the library Web pages of the 17 universities that received funding under the United States Department of Education's Title VI National Resource Centers program for Russia and East Europe in 2006 and 2007. It compares and contrasts the guides' overall approach, organization, scope, content, and degree of interlinking to guides at other institutions. Based on this comparison, it explores how the guides relate to information literacy efforts in general, and to Slavic studies in particular, and suggests future directions for the guides, highlighting the possibilities for greater collaboration in the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines five major sources of data on inflation in Russian book prices: professional book magazines, organizations' publications and Web sites, vendor catalogs, the reports written by John and Kristine Bushnell, and automated library management systems. The author discusses the limits, advantages, and methodologies for each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes the private book collection of Krasnoiarsk merchant Gennadii Vasil'evich Yudin, the sale of that collection to the Library of Congress in 1906, and several issues related to the subsequent fate of the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Yudin Collection, the contract for the purchase of which was signed in Krasnoiarsk, Siberia, November 3, 1906, and how it was handled at the Library of Congress after its receipt in April 1907. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Elektronnaia biblioteka (Electronic Library) of the Faculty of History at Moscow State University (MGU) holds online texts that relate to different periods of global history. It contains about 100 texts on Russian history electronically published within the MGU project, as well as links to hundreds of other historical sources on Russian history on the Internet. Project texts are usually accompanied by short annotations with comments on the role of the document in Russian history. Another important component of the Electronic Library is an example of a topic-oriented historical Internet resource (TOHIR) on Russian/Soviet labor history. Online access to the catalog of resources within the TOHIR is provided on the basis of MySQL and PHP-scripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The jubilee conference in honor of the 85th anniversary of the Russian Book Chamber (RBC) consisted of three parts: the 10th International Conference on Issues of Bibliology, a conference of the Association of Book Chambers, and a ceremonial session. The bibliology conference, the most important part, included discussion of such pressing problems as the decline of reading and book-buying in Russia, the difficulty of distributing books outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the problems caused by lack of modern equipment in printing establishments. But progress has also been made, e.g., the RBC's establishment of a single information platform for all participants in the book trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses online sources dealing with current Russian laws and regulations. Included are websites from branches of the federal government, commercial databases and commercial information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the digital library "Meeting of Frontiers," created by the Library of Congress. A team of Library staff and U.S. and Russian consultant at the Library of Congress developed the digital library project in 1999. The digital library includes around 2,500 items, comprising about 70,000 images from rare book, manuscript, map, film and sound recording collections of the Library of Congress. The website is completely bilingual containing information in both English and Russian. Some of the collections that are available in Meeting of Frontiers include the Frank G. Carpenter Collection of photographs from Alaska in the 1910s; the John C. Grabill Collection of photographs of 1880s frontier life in Colorado, South Dakota and Wyoming.

A review of the effects of the Russian financial crisis on publication and subscription to Russian periodicals and newspapers, along with specific actions to the crisis taken by three publishers and the Russian Post Office subscription agent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]