Editorial

On behalf of the entire editorial team, it is my pleasure to present to you the first issue in volume 25 of Slavic & East European Information Resources (SEEIR) for 2024. This regular issue opens with three scholarly pieces in the Research Articles section. These articles represent a collective adventure into the realm of tamizdat publications at the New York Public Library (NYPL): an introduction to tamizdat by Yasha Klots, a checklist of materials held at NYPL by Hee-Gwone Yoo, and a history of the NPYL’s acquisition of Russian-Soviet tamizdat by Bogdan Horbal. While these three articles appear on the pages of SEEIR as three separate pieces, they should be read as one unified composition.

The issue continues with the In Our Libraries section, featuring two narratives that describe people, events, and places during two different yet equally volatile periods in history. The first piece is a fascinating travelogue by Michael Neubert describing his adventures in acquisition throughout Moscow (Russia), and to Yerevan (Armenia), Minsk (Belarus), Tbilisi (Georgia), and Chișinău (Moldova) in 1992, on the cusp of monumental change in the region. Neubert’s narrative echoes the experience of many librarians who traveled to Russia and its neighbors during the social, cultural, economic, and political upheaval that characterized the 1990s. The second piece, by Edward Kasinec, is a brief yet equally intriguing description of the humanitarian work of Anna Van Schaick Mitchell and her life partner, Alma L’Hommedieu Ruggles, among post-World War I Russian refugees in Istanbul. The narrative draws upon hitherto untapped visual resources that belong to the Anna Mitchell Papers, which were gifted to the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in 1967. The illustrations included in Kasinec’s narrative shed light on some of the exquisite items contained in this archival collection.

The Internet column presents a practical and technical “reflection,” by Lana Soglasnova and Roman Tashlitskyy, on how to go about enhancing Bibliography/References sections of Wikipedia articles that naturally fall into the workflow of original cataloging of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian materials. The authors include many screenshots that enable readers to follow the authors’ process with visual cues.

The Memoirs column features a colorful exposé of Paul Crego’s journey through Slavic studies, the Russian and Georgian languages, divinity training, and eventually to the Library of Congress, where he worked for many years to build up the Georgian collection. The article includes four images from Crego’s life experience and a lengthy list of his accomplishments – publications, sermons preached, papers, lectures, and public addresses.

This issue concludes with three books reviews. The first, by Veronika Trotter, looks at the most recent work on the Russian Emigration to Prague from 1918-1945, published by the Slavonic Library in Prague. The second review, by Richard D. Custer, examines the catalog that accompanied the University of Toronto’s exhibit of Paul Robert Magocsi’s Carpatho-Ruthenica Collection; a catalog that features some of the most important items for Carpatho-Rusyn studies. In the third review, A. M. LaVey describes in vivid detail the various elements of a biobibliography dedicated to Edward Kasinec for his fifty years of scholarly contributions to Ukrainian studies bibliography and librarianship. The biobibliography is a Ukrainian traditional form of honoring a scholar’s life and work.

Congratulations to all the authors for their exceptional work and their flexibility and patience during the publication process. A special thanks goes out to the peer reviewers whose recommendations enriched the research articles in this issue, and to the journal’s editorial team for their expertise and promptness in editing their respective column pieces. As always, I encourage readers to consult with members of the editorial team about ideas for new articles and column pieces that would be appropriate for SEEIR. Whether you are working on an analytical research article, have an idea for a shorter narrative piece, or would like to review a book, your contributions to SEEIR help form the scholarly record of our field. For the full range of submission options and guidelines, please refer to the SEEIR website at the following URL: https://sites.google.com/site/seeirjournal.