save yourself a trip
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 10 October 2014, At: 10:01Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Slavic & East EuropeanInformation ResourcesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wsee20
Save Yourself a TripGordon B. Anderson aa University of Kansas Libraries , Lawrence, KS,66045-2800, USAPublished online: 20 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Gordon B. Anderson (2001) Save Yourself a Trip, Slavic & EastEuropean Information Resources, 1:1, 13-28, DOI: 10.1300/J167v01n01_03
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J167v01n01_03
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
Save Yourself a Trip:A Guide to Exploiting Your Home Library’s
Bibliographic Databasesfor Slavic-LanguageResearch Materials
Gordon B. Anderson
ABSTRACT. Some North American scholars believe that libraries ontheir continent lack adequate indexes and other finding aids to identifyscholarly publications and primary resources from Slavic and East Eu-ropean countries. In the belief that such materials can be located onlyby using esoteric finding aids, they may overlook the major Westernsubject bibliographies and indexes for the humanities and socialsciences. In addition, during the past decade an increasing number ofresearch library catalogs in North America, Europe and Eurasia havebecome accessible electronically to scholars around the world. Theauthor here lists and describes bibliographic databases which can be ofvalue to a search for Slavic- and East European language researchmaterials in the social sciences and humanities. Many of these tools canbe found even in smaller North American academic libraries. [Articlecopies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service:1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website:<http://www.haworthpressinc.com>]
KEYWORDS. Databases, indexes, bibliographies, Slavic, Eastern Eu-rope, Eurasia, Russia, social sciences, humanities
Library research in Slavic studies has always been a labor of love;some would say a love of labor. Slavic-studies scholars seem to pre-
Gordon B. Anderson is Reference Librarian and Slavic-Studies Bibliographer, Uni-versity of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, KS 66045-2800, USA (e-mail: <[email protected]>).
Slavic & East European Information Resources, Vol. 1(1) 2000E 2000 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 13
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES14
sume, often incorrectly, that North American research library collec-tions in their field lack adequate indexes and other finding aids toidentify needed scholarly publications and primary resources fromCentral and Eastern Europe. Or scholars assume that the materialsthey need simply do not exist over here and that only by working overthere in East European libraries, painstakingly searching through vol-umes of typescript indexes, card catalogs, and brittle bibliographiescan the scholar hope to identify and retrieve those Slavic-languagemonographs, articles, dissertations, documents, and other researchpublications and primary source materials vital to the project.The situation is nowadays quite different. The past decade’s rising
tide of world-wide electronic bibliographic access to research librarycatalogs and indexes and full-text access to documents, books andother scholarly publications has lifted the Slavic-studies boat alongwith all the other area-studies craft. The rich Slavic collections ofNorth America and of Western Europe have largely been cataloged oneither the OCLC or the RLIN on-line union catalogs. Within the pastdecade, national and university libraries in Central and Eastern Europehave made enormous progress in providing electronic access to theircollections and respective national bibliographies, some of which eveninclude the contents of periodicals. North American research librariescan provide access to these national bibliographies on CD-ROM (andthrough the Internet) and offer connections to major Slavic indexessuch as those generated by the Institute for Scientific Information inthe Social Sciences (INION) in Moscow. In addition, the Slavic-stud-ies scholar can also look forward to using Western European biblio-graphic and indexing tools as they become available in scholars’ homelibraries.In the belief that buried Slavic treasure can be dug up only by using
esoteric finding aids, the major North American subject bibliographiesand indexes for the humanities and social sciences have been over-looked as a means of bibliographic access to Slavic-language researchmaterials. While it is still necessary for most doctoral and post-doctor-al-level Slavic-studies scholars to undertake an extended visit to Cen-tral or East European research libraries to carry out original research,the literature search and much of the original research can be substan-tially accomplished close to home, in any one of the many fine re-search libraries in North America. The major subject-bibliographydatabases, from America: History & Life to Zoological Record, have
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 15
broadened their coverage considerably beyond their Anglo-centricorigins and provide extensive coverage of the scholarly literature inlanguages other than English, including the many Slavic and non-Slavic languages of Central and Eastern Europe. And these databasescover scholarly publications from at least the past three decades, andin many cases their coverage extends considerably farther back than1970.This paper is an attempt to list and describe those bibliographic
databases which can be of significant value to a comprehensive litera-ture search of Slavic-language research materials in the social sciencesand humanities. Descriptions of each tool’s scope and coverage arebased on the information given by the producer. An attempt is made tocompare the degree of coverage of Slavic-language resources to thesize of the entire database and to the corpus of Slavic-language re-search materials which North American research libraries hold. Forinstance, some of these databases, especially in the social sciences,cover the serial and monographic series publications from the researchinstitutes of East European universities and academies of science,publications which many North American libraries have been collect-ing for decades.Some of the databases discussed in this paper do not cover Slavic-
language publications as such, but they do cover West European re-search materials about the Central and East European area to such asignificant degree that the scholar should not fail to consult thesedatabases as well. The resources discussed here can be found in thereference collection and in the ‘‘electronic library’’ of the Universityof Kansas Libraries. It is assumed that other research libraries in NorthAmerica provide similar, perhaps greater, access to members of theirrespective communities.
HISTORY
Historical Abstracts and America: History & Life(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1955- )1
Historical Abstracts covers history from 1450 to the present outsidethe United States and Canada. America: History & Life covers theUnited States and Canada, including these countries’ relations with theother countries of the world. The two databases together cover over
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES16
2400 journals in over fifty languages, and these tools include bookreviews from thirteen history and bibliography journals.Historical Abstracts (and to a much lesser but still important extent
America: History & Life) cover the major history journals published inthe Slavic countries’ research institutes, universities, and academies ofscience, as well as their leading scholarly journals. In these databases,Slavic-language materials comprise somewhere between fifteen andtwenty-five per cent of the number of citations in English.
International Mediaeval Bibliography(Leeds, U.K: International Medieval Institute; Turnhout:Brepols Publishers, c1995- )
A bibliography of the European middle ages (ca. 450-1500), theIMB indexes over 4000 periodicals and over 5000 volumes of pro-ceedings, Festschriften and essay collections. The CD-ROM versiondoes not have a language index, so it is not possible to restrict a searchby language. However, a search on a Slavic-area topic (for example,Jan Hus) should yield a large number of Slavic-language sources. TheCD-ROM version is only a partial duplication of the printed Interna-tional Mediaeval Bibliography. Electronic coverage begins in 1984,the print index starts in 1967, although the intent is to bring the twoversions up to par by the end of 1999.
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
MLA International Bibliography(Modern Language Association, 1963- )
The MLA International Bibliography provides access to scholarlyresearch in over 3000 journals and series as well as monographs,working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats. Theprinted version covers back to 1919, with the annual bibliography(called American Bibliography) for the years 1919-1955 issued ineach volume of the Association’s Publications (PMLA). The MLA’scoverage of Slavic-language materials (as a per cent of English-lan-guage materials) is about the same as that for America: History & Lifeand Historical Abstracts.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 17
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts [LLBA](La Jolla, Calif.: Sociological Abstracts, 1973- )
Continues Language and Language Behavior Abstracts. Publishedquarterly since 1967, LLBA covers over 2,000 serials from manyfields, for example, anthropology, communications, comparative liter-ature, medicine, psychology, philosophy and information science.Slavic-language journals include the major linguistics, psychology,information-sciences, and philological journals and monographic se-ries from Russian and East European universities and research insti-tutes.
OTHER HUMANITIES INDEXES
Philosopher’s Index(Palo Alto, Calif.: Dialog Information Service)
This database provides indexing and abstracts from books and over400 journals in philosophy and related interdisciplinary fields pub-lished in the United States and the Western world. Coverage is from1940 to the present for U.S. materials, 1967 to the present for non-U.S.references. Slavic-language coverage favors Czech imprints, with Pol-ish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian materials each comprising roughlyhalf the number of Czech citations. Slavic-language coverage clearlylags behind German or French materials.
ATLA Religion Database(Evanston, Ill.: American Theological Library Association)
Formerly called Religion Index, this database contains ‘‘over onemillion bibliographic records covering the research literature ofreligion in 26 languages, [including] article citations from 650 jour-nals, essay citations from 14,000 multi-author works, and book reviewcitations.’’ The ATLA Religion Database is an on-line compilation ofseveral indexes: Religion Index I (Periodicals, 1949- ); Religion IndexII (Multi-author works, 1961- ); Research in Ministry, 1981- ; Index toBook Reviews in Religion, 1949- ; and Methodist Reviews Index(1818-1985). Slavic-language coverage in this database is not exten-
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES18
sive, covering mainly Czech-, Russian- and Polish-language citations,plus a handful of other languages from Central and Eastern Europe. Anote of caution: many citations appear to be incorrectly coded, forinstance coded ‘‘Czech’’ instead of Catalan and ‘‘Polish’’ instead ofPortuguese. The citations coded ‘‘Lithuanian’’ appear to be in Latin,and several citations coded ‘‘Romanian’’ appear to have nothing to dowith either the language or the country.
International Index to Music Periodicals(Chadwyck-Healey)
The IIMP ‘‘covers nearly all aspects of the world of music, from themost scholarly studies to the latest crazes, [in] some 375 internationalmusic periodicals from over 20 countries. . . .’’ Slavic-language cover-age appears limited to three journals Hudební v da, Muzyka, andMuzikološki zbornik.
Library Literature(New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1984- )
This tool indexes some 350 library and information science periodi-cals from around the world, as well as selected state library journals,over 600 books annually, conference proceedings, library schooltheses, and pamphlets; and book reviews. Slavic and East Europeanjournals are limited to such major ones as Bibliotekar’; Bibliotekarz;Könyvtári figyeló; Nauchno-tekhnicheskaia informatsiia, Seriia 1(Organizatsiia i metodika informatsionnoi raboty), Sovetskaia biblio-grafiia, and [Sovetskoe] Bibliotekovedenie.
RILM: Abstracts of Music Literature(New York: International Repertory of Music Literature, 1967- )
Produced under the auspices of the International MusicologicalSociety, the International Association of Music Libraries, and theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, the RILM index covers jour-nal and monograph literature in historical musicology, ethno-musicol-ogy, instrument, voice, dance and music therapy.Like the MLA International Bibliography, RILM covers almost ev-
ery Slavic and East European language, particularly Croatian, Czech,Hungarian, Polish and Russian. For the period 1969-1996, RILM in-
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 19
dexed almost 22,000 Slavic-language citations (c.f., the MLA Interna-tional Bibliography contains ca. 82,500 Slavic-language citations forthe period 1963-1996).
OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES INDEXES
Agricola(Washington, DC: National Agricultural Library)
Agricola includes over 3 million citations to material acquired by theNational Agricultural Library and cooperating institutions. It indexesarticles, audiovisual materials, books, book chapters, computer data-bases and software, maps, manuscripts, serials, and sound recordings,from 1970 to the present, in the sciences and in the social sciences, suchas agricultural economics, geography, and rural sociology.
Anthropological Literature on Disc(Boston: G. K. Hall; Tozzer Library, Harvard University)
This is an author and subject index to serial and edited worksreceived by the Tozzer Library, the anthropological library of HarvardUniversity. Anthropological Literature’s primary coverage is in thefields of archaeology, biological and physical anthropology, culturaland social anthropology, and linguistics. Related social and medicalscience fields are included. Sources indexed are primarily in Europeanlanguages; articles of two or more pages in the Germanic, Romance,and Slavic languages, as well as English, are covered as well.The CD-ROM version includes these materials from the early 1980s.
However, as of 1992, ‘‘. . . no Slavic language foreign titles are in-cluded.’’ A search of the database’s source list produced 81 journal titles(out of several thousand) in Slavic and East European languages, primari-ly Czech, Hungarian, and Polish, but none was indexed after 1991.For monograph indexing, which includes Slavic-language titles in
appropriate numbers, see G.K. Hall’s Bibliographic Guide To An-thropology and Archaeology, which since 1988 continues the authorand subject catalog microfiche sets from the Tozzer library.
Geobase(Elsevier Science, 1980- )
Geobase ‘‘covers worldwide literature on geography, geology, car-tography, ecology, and related disciplines. Over 2,000 journals are
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES20
fully covered, and an additional 3,000 are selectively covered. Morethan 2,000 books, monographs, conference proceedings, and reportsare also covered.’’This is a good index for Slavic-language periodical articles on
economic and political geography (e.g., spatial planning), althoughcoverage is low compared to other regions, and Polish and Czechpublications predominate. Geobase indexes many Slavic-area re-search institute (both universities & academies of science) publica-tions, as well as the major scholarly journals.
PsycInfo(Arlington, Va.: American Psychological Association, 1887- )
The Web version of Psychological Abstracts, PsycInfo containssummaries of the world’s serial literature in psychology and related disci-plines (such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, phar-macology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law) pub-lished between 1887 and the present, covering over 1300 journals, in 27languages, from approximately 50 countries. (The Book Chapters andBooks file covers only English-language materials.) Coverage of Slavic-language periodicals goes as far back as 1926.
Sociological Abstracts(San Diego: Sociological Abstracts, Inc., 1973- )
Sociological Abstracts covers sociology and related disciplines byincluding ‘‘abstracts of journal articles selected from over 2500 jour-nals [in 30 different languages from about 55 countries], abstracts ofconference papers presented at various sociological association meet-ings, relevant dissertation listings from Dissertations Abstracts Interna-tional, enhanced bibliographic citations of book reviews, and abstractsof selected sociology books.’’ Related fields include anthropology, eco-nomics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, de-mography, political science and social psychology.Because PsycInfo and Sociological Abstracts cover such a large
body of scholarly literature, the ratio of Slavic- to English-languagecitations appears small, but the total number of publications indexed issignificant. For example, PsycInfo contains more than 10,600 citationsin Russian alone and over 20,400 citations in Slavic and other East-Central European languages combined.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 21
World Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology Abstracts(Wallingford, U.K.: Center for Agriculture and Biosciences)
Available online since 1973, as part of the CAB Abstracts, throughDIALOG and other on-line hosts, WAERSA covers agricultural eco-nomics, regional policy and development, international trade and fi-nance, and rural sociology. While WAERSA gives global coverage ofagriculture and rural economics journals and conference papers, Slav-ic-language titles here are relatively few in number and are concen-trated in the fields of agriculture and economics. World AgriculturalEconomics is not available online in the University of Kansas Li-braries.Since 1993 CAB Abstracts have been available on CD-ROM through
Silver Platter Information Retrieval Software (SPIRS). Another CD-ROM product, AgECONCD, was started in 1973 and includes morethan 200,000 references and abstracts to the international literature onthe economic and social aspects of agriculture.
GENERAL INDEXES
Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index(Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for Scientific Information)
A&HCI covers virtually every discipline in the arts and humanities.It indexes approximately 6,100 of the world’s leading journals (ca.1000 fully covered, 5,100 selectively covered, although during anyone year the numbers may be noticeably lower than these). Coveragebegins with 1975. SSCI covers over 4700 journals, beginning with1981. Each index covers the other two citation indexes (that is, includ-ing the Science Citation Index) for relevant items. A limited numberof monographic series are also included.These databases cover predominantly English-language and West-
European journals (each database contains over 2,500,000 citations,claims the publisher). A&HCI gives better bibliographic access toSlavic-language journals than does SSCI. For example, for the years1975-1994 A&HCI contains almost 8,000 citations from Novyi mirand over 5,600 citations from Voprosy istorii. SSCI contains far fewerRussian and other Slavic journal citations, and these are predominant-ly science journals.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES22
Bibliography of Asian Studies(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies, 1971- )
The on-line version of the BAS contains over 400,000 records on allsubjects (especially humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East,Southeast, and South Asia, including the Soviet and Russian Far East.This coverage thus makes the BAS an appropriate resource for thisessay. The BAS covers Western-language periodical articles, mono-graphs (not indexed after 1991), chapters in books, conference pro-ceedings, and Festschriften. For the period 1971-1991 the BAS pro-vides significant indexing of Russian-language publications about theregion from the Academy of Science of the USSR.
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe(Reed-Elsevier)
Not just a periodicals index, Lexis-Nexis is an electronic library offull-text articles, documents, reports, transcripts, and other writtenmaterials in law, government, business, news, and other current politi-cal, economic, and professional information. Although not a bibliog-raphy of scholarly publications, Lexis-Nexis covers a number of Rus-sian and East European news sources published in English (e.g., ThePrague Post, Moscow News, Foreign Trade), wire services east (e.g.,PAP, CTK, Official Kremlin Int’l News Broadcast) and west and se-lected translations of articles from Russian and East European politi-cal, business, and law periodicals and newspapers. Almost all materi-als covered are available in full text. The database is updated daily.
Russian Academy of Science Bibliographies(Moscow: INION)
One of the most promising new electronic indexes to Slavic periodi-cals is INION’s social-science bibliographic series Novaia literaturapo obshchestvennym i gumanitarnym naukam now available on theUniversity of Kansas Libraries’ network under the above title. (Otherlibraries may use a different title, such as the Russian Social Sciences/Humanities Index.) For several years the Russian Academy ofSciences’ Institute for Scientific Information in the Social Sciences(RAN/INION) has offered its social-science bibliographies online to
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 23
individual U.S. libraries or library consortia via the Research LibrariesInformation Network (RLIN).The RAS bibliographies cover books, manuscripts, dissertations,
and over 10,000 social-science and humanities periodicals publishedsince 1990 in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Eu-rope, and other countries of the world. Abstracts are in transliteratedRussian. Subject-heading searching can be done in English or Rus-sian, although the Russian access points are greater in number andmore complete. All Cyrillic-alphabet language entries have beentransliterated according to the Library of Congress transliterationscheme.
World News Connection(Washington, DC: National Technical Information Service)
‘‘A foreign news service from the U.S. Government,’’ World NewsConnection is the Web-accessible version of the Foreign BroadcastInformation Service’s Daily Reports, materials which have been avail-able to scholars in print and on microfiche for approximately the pastfifty years. The WNC provides, usually within seventy-two hours oforiginal publication or broadcast, English-language full-text transla-tions or summaries of newspaper articles, conference proceedings,periodical articles, non-classified technical reports, and television andradio broadcasts covering significant socioeconomic, political, scien-tific, technical, and environmental issues and events. In addition toproviding the documents in English, theWNC can serve as an index tolocal and national newspapers in the Slavic world.Because of significant changes in and new awareness of copyright
law, and the rapid changes in international communications, manypublishers of the source materials have been slow to grant permissionto translate and distribute these materials via the NTIS’s web service.Thus, a number of titles previously available through the FBIS DailyReports are not yet available over theWorld News Connection.
INDEXES TO NON-SLAVIC MATERIAL
Art Index(H. W. Wilson Company)
Art Index covers scholarship from more than 313 periodicals pub-lished throughout the world. Periodical coverage includes English-
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES24
language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, as well asperiodicals published in French, Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish,Dutch, and Swedish. In addition to articles, Art Index indexes repro-ductions of works of art that appear in the periodicals covered.
PAIS International(New York: Public Affairs Information Service, Inc., 1972- )
This database contains records indexing articles, books, conferenceproceedings, government documents, book chapters, and statisticaldirectories in areas relating to public affairs. On-line coverage beginsin 1972 for citations from the print publications PAIS Bulletin, PAISForeign Language Index, and PAIS International in Print. Abstractshave been included since 1985. The first print publication, The Bulle-tin of the Public Affairs Information Service, began in 1915.Non-English coverage is limited to articles in French, German,
Italian, Portuguese & Spanish. However, PAIS International also of-fers back-door indexing of selected Russian newspapers and journalsin English translation, because the database includes the Current Di-gest of the [Post-]Soviet Press, International Affairs (Moscow), andthe Russian Social Science Review (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), all ofwhich are journals of translations of Russian-language articles. PAISsubjects include agriculture, the environment, law & legislation, bank-ing & finance, business, political science & government, public ad-ministration, international relations, statistics, education, demograph-ics, and health.
Periodicals Contents Index(Chadwyck-Healey, 1900-1991)
PCI indexes the complete tables of contents, for the period1900-1991 of over 2200 humanities and social-science periodicals, inFrench, German, Spanish, and other Western languages (as well asEnglish). This index provides perhaps the most extensive coverage ofNorth American and West European scholarly journals published be-fore 1970, filling in an important bibliographic lacuna.
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES FROM GERMANY
While the U.S. and British periodicals-contents indexes dominatethe market, European resources should not be neglected. One database
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 25
to watch is the Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur(Osnabruck: Felix Dietrich Verlag), now available in electronic for-mat. Begun in print in 1896, the IBZ covers the European social-sci-ence and humanities periodical literature in the West and South Slaviclanguages, plus Russian, Albanian, and Hungarian. In addition to thesocial sciences and humanities, the IBZ also covers scholarly publicationsin the earth sciences, mathematics, statistics, information technology,sports, and book and library science. The IBZ database covers from1982 to the present, in some 2.5 million records.In addition, this publisher also offers its book-review index, the
Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen (1971-) in electronicformat for the years 1985 to the present. For the past two years Die-trich Verlag has published in electronic format the East EuropeanCatalogue, which comprises all machine-readable data held by theBavarian State Library from and about Eastern Europe (descriptionfrom the publisher’s catalog). At present, this resource contains some210,000 catalog entries--both monographs and periodicals, which in-clude publications from Central, Southeast, and East Europe as well aspublications from the Asian parts of Russia.For the past year North American member libraries in the ALA/
ACRL Global Resources Program’s German Resources Project havebeen working together with Dietrich Verlag and the GemeinsamerBibliotheksverbund (GBV), a large consortium of north German li-braries, to supply rapid document delivery of articles in the IBZ toscholars in North America.
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES FROM EASTERN EUROPE
Libraries in Eastern Europe have made tremendous advances inautomating their catalogs and national bibliographies. For example,the Polish National Library has for the past decade provided much ofthe Polish national bibliography in electronic format. The online ver-sion of the Bibliografia Zawarto ci Czasopism (periodicals contents,1947- ) begins in 1996. This index contains over 110,000 citationsfrom over 1,000 periodicals in the social sciences and humanities. ThePrzewodnik Bibliograficzny (national bibliography: monographs,1944/45- ) is available on CD-ROM for the years 1982-1998. A subsetof the previous title, the Bibliografia Wydawnictw Ci g ych Nowych,
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES26
Zawieszonych i Zmieniaj cych Tytu (new, suspended and changedserials titles, begun in 1981) is available electronically for the years1985-1998. These electronic bibliographies are mounted on Polishresearch library networks, but only for their registered users, just asNorth American research libraries offer electronic access to their data-bases. The National Library in Warsaw offers these and other electron-ically formatted bibliographies for sale (see their Web site: <http://www.bn.org.pl/cennik.htm>).With World Wide Web access rapidly replacing on-site ownership
of databases, researchers in North America can go directly to thesource of these bibliographic databases. For example, the Czech Na-tional Library provides outside researchers bibliographic access to itsonline catalog (which indexes Czech books since 1965 and all materi-als acquired since 1995), articles from Czech newspapers and periodi-cals (1991- ), the CASLIN (Czech and Slovak library network) unioncatalog, the STT database (early printed books, 1501-1800), a special-ized database of the Manuscripts and Early Printed Books Depart-ment, and several other bibliographic directories.The online public-access catalog (OPAC) of the Slovenská knižnica
(Matica slovenska) contains over 250,000 bibliographic records fromthe Slovak National Bibliography since 1977 and records for non-Slo-vak books and other documents added since 1990.The online catalog of the Slovene National and University Library
was begun in 1988 and contains over 320,000 records. The Sloveneco-operative database (named COBIB), in effect, the Slovene nationalunion catalog, contains some 1.2 million records for monographs,serials, nonbook materials, and a smaller number of journal articles.The Slovenska bibliografija, available on CD-ROM, covers Slovenebooks published between 1989 and 1994.The Bowker-Saur Company has published the Russian National
Bibliography = Rossiiskaia natsional’naia bibliografiia and the ac-companying Russian Books In Print Plus CD-ROM. The bibliographycontains bibliographic records for Russian books published since 1946and can be searched in Cyrillic or Roman script. The online catalog ofthe Russian National Library (St. Petersburg) contains bibliographicrecords for Russian books (1998- ), dissertations (1996- ), technologi-cal literature (1997- ), and cartographic materials (1994- ). See theirWeb site, <http://www.nlr.ru/cat/>, for a more detailed listing of thecatalogs and files available in that library.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
In Our Libraries 27
These examples indicate that there are subtle differences amongnational bibliographies, national library catalogs and national unioncatalogs. The most extensive access to European national library re-sources is through the GABRIEL service from Great Britain, withmirrors in various other European countries, which provides links tomany European national bibliographies, national union catalogs, andnational library OPACs. Its Web site at <http://portico.bl.uk/gabriel/>lists almost all the Slavic and East European countries’ national li-braries and provides detailed information about their collections andonline services. At present, not all the national libraries listed on theWeb site offer remote electronic access to their online catalogs ornational bibliographies, but many do offer one or more remote con-nections.
IN CONCLUSION
Over the past five decades since 1945, many North American re-search libraries have amassed large and valuable collections of currentand antiquarian Slavic-language imprints and provided extensive bib-liographic access to these collections through their own and coopera-tive union catalogs. For most of this period, these libraries’ catalogs,and the bibliographies and periodical indexes based on their holdings,formed the corpus of the bibliographic access tools available for Slav-ic-studies scholarship in North America. Thus, although there aresome frustrations in carrying out research in Slavic studies in Centraland Eastern Europe, the North American scholar has been able toexploit an enormous body of Slavic-language scholarship and prima-ry-source materials close to home.The new electronic media have eased many burdens in the research
process and have significantly enhanced the ability of scholars world-wide to seek new areas of research and inquiry. In the new millen-nium, research libraries in Central and Eastern Europe will be provid-ing very much the same kinds of bibliographic and full-text access toscholarly research materials as their North American colleagues.No longer should North American scholars and librarians alike
automatically--and erroneously--assume that, because the necessaryresources are not in Western European languages or in the Romanalphabet, only highly specialized and exotic indexing tools are avail-able for locating material. Librarians need to be aware that a large
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4
SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN INFORMATION RESOURCES28
number of electronic--and print--bibliographic tools in their libraries’general reference collections are highly useful in providing access toresearch materials needed by Slavic-studies scholars. It is a tribute tothe work of Slavic librarians and the importance of their libraries’Slavic-language research collections that these electronic indexingand abstracting tools include so many Central and East Europeanlanguage sources in their bibliographies. And it will not be muchlonger before research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic are joinedelectronically via the World Wide Web to provide all scholars with‘‘seamless’’ access to all their collections.
NOTE
1. Notes on how to subscribe to databases are not included in this paper, because itis assumed that the primary audience, North American academic librarians, alreadyhas access to either the databases themselves or literature about them. For those whodo not have such access, information on how to subscribe can generally be found oneither the database’s or the publisher’s Web site by using a search engine such as AltaVista. All but the online library catalogs tend to be available only by subscription(i.e., for a fee) and only to users covered by the subscription’s license. --Ed.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
The
Uni
vers
ity o
f M
anch
este
r L
ibra
ry]
at 1
0:01
10
Oct
ober
201
4