It is with mixed feelings that I write this final editorial of my tenure as editor. By the time this issue appears in print it will have been 18 years since Jim Cole, Alan Pollard, and I started to bring the idea of Slavic & East European Information Resources to fruition. (See my editorial in vol. 9, no. 1, “Looking Back at 10 Years of the Idea of SEEIR,” for more about the early years.) I am glad to have had a role in providing a forum where we, the international professional Slavic librarian community, have been able to exchange information and learn about each other’s efforts; support one another; promote the development of our profession; and further the status and condition of Slavic collections. I now transfer editorship of the journal to the capable hands of Daniel Pennell, Curator for Slavic, European, and Global Studies in the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh.
Dan should already be familiar to the SEEIR community. In addition to his other professional activities, he was the journal’s reviews editor from vol. 5 (2004) through vol. 9 (2008) and has published several times in these pages. A couple of recent examples are: “The Fate of Book Chambers and National Bibliographies in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova Since 1991,” vol. 11, no. 1 (2010); and a review of Dicţionar de personalităţi istorice româneşti [Dictionary of Romanian Historical Personages], 2nd edition, by Nicolae Constantin, vol. 13, no. 2–3 (2012).
As for me, I retired from my position as Curator for Slavic and East European Collections at Stanford University Libraries at the end of 2014. Since then I have continued to work there part time (together with Barbara Krupa) in an interim arrangement until my successor is in place. I enjoy having more time to devote to SEEIR. At the same time, though, I find that I am starting to lose touch with the latest developments in my own library and in the field in general. It is time for Dan to take over.
Among my near-term goals during retirement are to take a retrospective look the journal’s content while I was editor, with statistics; to write a piece about my career for the Memoirs column; and to write at least one review. You have not heard the last from me! I also look forward to seeing more of my family (especially my patient and long-suffering husband) and doing more of the other things I enjoy: travel, exercise, meditation, cooking, reading, houseplants, etc.
Volume 17, no. 1–2 is another varied issue. Thanks to your submissions, it is bigger than our last double issue. A few additional articles that were not quite ready this time should appear in the next general issue, volume 17, no. 4. Please keep writing and submitting! Articles, column pieces, and reviews appear in the journal only if you write and submit them. See the end of this editorial for instructions and possibilities.
In this issue the reader will find material related to the Czech Republic, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia and its diaspora, the Mongol Empire, Russia, Subcarpathian Rus’, Ukraine, and the region as a whole. Subject-wise, we have the first bibliographer of an important literary author; experiences and attitudes of librarians in a significant new post-Soviet library; a demand-driven e-book program for English-language books in an East European library; three conferences; a department and special collection that provides research and information to the government and the public; and five book reviews.
The issue begins with a peer-reviewed article by Irina Andrianova, head of the Web-Laboratory of Petrozavodsk State University’s Philological Faculty and a frequent author on the subject of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Her article, “Dostoyevsky’s First Bibliographer,” is about Anna Snytkina Dostoevskaia, wife of the novelist. She became the first bibliographer of his literary work, publishing the Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ sochinenii F. M. Dostoevskogo [Bibliographical index of the works of F. M. Dostoyevsky] in 1906. The article draws from Dostoevskaia’s memoirs and archival resources, exploring the history of the bibliography, the textual challenges in the process of compiling it, and its enduring importance in Dostoyevsky studies. Dostoevskaia died before she could finish a second volume. Today researchers are working to restore a digital version of her bibliography, as well as to reconstruct virtually the Dostoyevsky Memorial Museum, which she created.
Next is a peer-reviewed article by Celia Emmelhainz, Anthropology and Qualitative Research Librarian at the University of California Berkeley, and Darya Bukhtoyarova, Customer Education Specialist for Thomson Reuters in Kazakhstan, entitled “‘I Fell into Librarianship’: Experiences of Post-Soviet Librarians at the National Academic Library in Astana, Kazakhstan.” The authors explore the attitudes of 24 librarians in post-Soviet Kazakhstan concerning their roles at the new National Academic Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors used ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys. They found that these librarians either sensed a “calling” to librarianship or “fell into” library careers given life circumstances, and they value their library for its contribution to cultural preservation and digital access on a national scale.
The third peer-reviewed article is “Demand-Driven E-book Program in Tallinn University of Technology Library: The First Two Years of Experience with the EBL Platform,” by Kate-Riin Kont, head of the Acquisitions Department at that library. She discusses the literature on demand-driven (patron-driven) e-book programs in academic libraries and reports on the first 2 years of using such a program for English-language books. She gives an overview of the advantages and successful measures of demand-driven acquisition in the form of short-term loans.
The In Our Libraries column contains two conference reports and the description of a special department and collection. The first, by David Jacobs, archivist at the Hoover Institution, reports on the fourth conference of the Baltic Heritage Network (BHN), held in Rīga, Latvia on June 30–July 2, 2015. The conference title was “Tracing the Baltic Road to Independence in the Diaspora Archives.” The organization’s goal is to link repositories in the Baltic diaspora with archives in the Baltic States, “thereby sharing information about holdings and research issues relating to the history of the Baltic emigration.”
The second conference report is by Patricia Polansky, Russian Bibliographer at the University of Hawaii. She attended two conferences during the summer of 2015, the annual conference of the British Slavic (Slavonic) librarians’ organization, the Council for Slavonic and East European Library and Information Services (COSEELIS) in Cambridge, England; and the ninth World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES), in the Makuhari convention center in Chiba city, outside of Tokyo.
The final piece in this column is “The Special Collection Fond of the Presidents of Ukraine as an Integrated Informational Resource for Research on the Institution of the Presidency,” by Volodymyr Udovyk, its former head. The collection is a department of the V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. The author writes about its function as well as its history, purpose, activities, and operational features. The department collects and uses various types of documents related to the institution of the presidency in Ukraine and in other countries. It also conducts research and provides scholarly and informational resources to government officials, to the scholarly community, to students, and to society in general.
In the Reviews section authors review five books. First is Thomas Dousa’s look at Rick Fawn’s revision and update of Jiří Hochmann’s Historical Dictionary of the Czech State, published by Scarecrow Books. Dousa finds it a useful reference work, but it has some flaws. It is, he writes, “written for a readership with an interest in, but little knowledge of, the Czech lands, … [providing] a store of basic information with which the beginner can start to become acquainted with the broad outlines of Czech history.”
In the second, Maria Silvestri reviews Hana Opleštilová and Lukáš Babka’s Zmizelý svět Podkarpatské Rusi ve fotografiích Rudolfa Hůlky (1887–1961) = The Lost World of Subcarpathian Rus’ in the Photographs of Rudolf Hůlka (1887–1961), published by the Slavonic Library, part of the National Library of the Czech Republic. She writes that the authors “place Hůlka’s photography not only in a historical context, but solidly within the region’s visual arts as well.” The book documents some of the library’s collection of over 4,000 of Hůlka’s photographs, “about one-third of which are photographs of the landscapes, people, and folk art of Subcarpathia.” She hopes that the work will stimulate further scholarship on the region.
Mark Kulikowski discusses Boris Belenkin’s Malotirazhnye izdaniia po istorii politicheskikh repressii v SSSR v biblioteke Obshchestva “Memorial” [Small-print-run publications on the history of political repressions in the USSR in the library of the “Memorial” Society] in the third review. The Memorial society is one of the few Russian organizations from the very late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods that is still functioning and even growing. Its original mission was to “collect information on the millions of … victims of Stalinist terror and the GULAG system,” but its work soon expanded. It has moved into human rights and legal affairs, and the government has repeatedly challenged it in court and even temporarily seized its collection. The book “is the very first to record small-print-run books and serials published in the Russian Federation from the 1990s either independently, under publisher or university imprint, or under the auspices of Memorial.” The work is thus valuable in itself, but even more so because the publications listed could potentially disappear along with the organization itself.
In the fourth review Megan Browndorf discusses Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko: bibliohrafiia vydan’ tvoriv 1840–2014 [Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko: bibliography of publications of his work: 1840–2014], edited by O. S. Onyshchenko and V. I. Popyk and others and published by the V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. The work first looks thoroughly at the previously published guides and bibliographies. The bibliography itself is divided into two sections: one for original language materials, and one for translations. Extensive and useful indexes take up nearly as many pages as the bibliography.
In the final review Akram Khabibullaev looks at I. M. Mirgaleev’s Zolotaia Orda: bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ [The Golden Horde: bibliographic index], published by the M. A. Usmanov Center for the Study of Golden Horde History at the Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan. The work is quite a comprehensive list of scholarly research on the topic, writes Khabibullaev, but it has some shortcomings that make it difficult to use and also some mistakes. Still it is “a useful reference guide for those who are interested in the Golden Horde,” especially beginning researchers.
I am grateful to the Slavic librarian community for the support you have been giving to SEEIR over the years and to me as editor. Please continue! With your contributions, the journal will continue to prosper under Dan Pennell’s editorship. Write an article to be peer-reviewed, a column piece, or a review. See the full range of submission options and deadlines on the journal’s new website, https://sites.google.com/site/seeirjournal/.
Enjoy the issue.