IU Digital Library Program To Digitize Russian Index: Cyrillic Goes Cyber

July 1999

The Indiana University Digital Library Program will receive from the U.S. Department of Education $80,000 per year for three years to digitize a Russian index of periodicals and make it available to scholars via the World Wide Web.

IU will digitize a 20-year portion (1956-1975) of Letopis’ Zhurnal’ nykh Statei, the Russian index that contains information on articles appearing in more than 1,700 popular and scholarly journals.

"It’s a comprehensive, national bibliography of the Soviet Union," says Kris Brancolini, co-director of the project and IU librarian. "Researchers will now have access to information that, in its paper form, is hard to obtain and poorly organized."

Only about 15 to 20 universities in the United States have back issues or current subscriptions to the series, and most of these holdings are incomplete. Digitizing the index, which is a serial publication that lacks an integrated index itself, will increase access to information published during the years of the Cold War.

"There are no subject or title indexes to this massive publication," says Murlin Croucher, Slavic Studies Area bibliographer. "Any person in the world currently wishing to do Soviet research has the daunting task of endless searching to find periodical literature. Digitizing this massive publication will make possible author, title, and keyword searches, instantaneously covering a 20-year run of Soviet journals."

And that’s a boon to researchers, at IU and all over the world, who have limited access to a valuable resource whose pages can deteriorate with every turn. The index, which is the Russian language equivalent of Readers’ Guide, Humanities Index and Social Sciences Index combined, was printed on highly acidic paper which has become extremely brittle. "The pages crumble like corn flakes," Brancolini says.

Digitizing the work will preserve the information recorded in the paper volumes, disseminate that information more widely, and vastly improve the searching capabilities. "This is what a research library should do," says Suzanne Thorin, Ruth Lilly University Dean of University Libraries. "We are supporting the research and instruction that takes place at this university—and at the same time making our valuable resources available to a worldwide audience."

The text is in Cyrillic, and that poses special challenges. The Digital Library team will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to scan approximately 250,000 pages, and Russian-language specialists will proofread for accuracy.

IU’s Digital Library program is a university-wide partnership of the IU Libraries, University Information Technology Services, and the School of Library and Information Science.

Indiana University is perfectly suited for this project. The university’s programs in Russian and East European Studies is among the finest in the United States. The IU Libraries’ highly regarded Slavic Collection, comprising more than 550,000 volumes and 1,600 serial subscriptions, provides unique reference works for scholars from around the nation and world.

The Department of Education grant, awarded through the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access Program, seeks to facilitate access to or preserve foreign information resources in print or electronic forms; to develop new means of shared electronic access to international data; and to develop methods for the wide dissemination of resources written in non-Roman language alphabets. Read more about it in the Letopis' Zhurnal'nykh Statei Digitization Project Summary.

For more information about the Digital Library Program, contact Kristine Brancolini, Director, at (812) 855-3710.

---

Last Updated: November 1, 2000
URL: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/letopis/letopis_press_release.html
Comments: libweb@www.indiana.edu
Copyright 1997-99, The Trustees of Indiana University