Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata

Citation

Guha, M. (2009), "Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 2, pp. 150-151. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910937032

Judging purely from the title I had expected a broad‐ranging book on the problems of learning about another culture. The sub‐title says it all however. This is a narrowly focused collection of presentations from a 2006 workshop for library staff responsible for American university Slavonic and East European collections, containing papers on assorted topics that happened to be of interest to the chosen contributors. Having recently been glancing at Georgia, I was sorry not to find a discussion of the problems of acquiring information from the Caucasian states, for example. (When you get a country smaller than Scotland where different sections of the population cannot even agree on the spelling of the name of the capital city, retrieving information becomes an interesting problem! (Guha, 2008))

The past quarter‐century has seen two coincident upheavals. One is the collapse of the old Russian Empire. Quite surprisingly the Bolsheviks managed to stick the Tsarist empire in Asia back together as the “Soviet Union” after the First World War, and then forced together a collection of satellite states in Eastern Europe after the second. These were characterised by a high degree of central control, including, or rather, most especially, control over the publishing and distribution of information. All that has been swept away. Simultaneously there has been an extraordinary change in information handling technology. These librarians have had to face the double whammy of a total change in their sources of information and a total change in their techniques for handling information. As far as I can gather from this book they have adapted remarkably well.

Publishing in Russia and East Europe appears to have increased vastly during this period: a dramatic decline in the state output being more than counterbalanced by a huge growth in private publishing. This does not seem to be the case in Central Asia however, where the paper rather pathetically titled “Iltimos, bizga kitoblar yuboring” [Please can we have some books] concludes that the reason why US libraries are not receiving more books from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc is because less are being published, not because their suppliers have fallen down on the job.

Most of the papers are highly technical and specialised – “Application of MARC21‐Concise Format for Bibliographic Data in Bulgarian Libraries” for example. Two digitization projects reported on – the image database for the huge William Brumfield collection of Russian architectural photographs and the digitization of a special collection of Czech and Slovak posters, may be of interest to a wider readership of art librarians, and, for some reason, there is a paper on Modern Greek collections in US libraries. [Most universities I know of lump Modern Greek in with Classics rather than with East European studies.]

I cannot see much of a potential readership for this book aside from American academic librarians with responsibility for specialised Slavic collections. Most of these will probably have been at the workshop anyway, but will presumably be glad to see its results in book form. Most of the papers are single case studies describing individual projects using current technology, and so will date rapidly. Nevertheless this is a work of careful scholarship on an area where there is a distinct lack of English‐language information, and should be welcomed as such.