By Kit Condill (REEES Librarian, University Library)
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s wide-ranging effects on academic year 2020-2021, the University Library has continued to make major REEES acquisitions in print and electronic formats, across a variety of disciplines. For example, Library users now have access to Brill's new Bibliography of the history and archaeology of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, an ambitious and highly-multilingual database of scholarship on the twenty countries situated between the Alps and the Urals, covering the time period from 500 to 1250 C.E. Twenty-four percent of the entries in the database are for Russian-language works, followed by English (12%), German (10%), Polish (9%), Bulgarian (9%), Hungarian (7%), Czech (5%), Romanian (4%), French (4%), and other languages, for a total of over 60,000 entries dating from the late 18th century to the present.
Given the international geopolitical situation, the Library also now subscribes to East View’s Universal Database of Russian Military and Security Periodicals, which provides access to the searchable full text of over 80 Russian- and English-language journals on military topics dating back as far as 1992. For historians, gender studies scholars, and others, the searchable full text of every issue of the Soviet propaganda publication Soviet Woman (1945-1991) and the long-running Russian newspaper Gudok (1918-2019) are now also available through East View. And the Library has continued its subscription to the world’s largest Russian-language database, Integrum, which provides full-text access to millions of documents from Russian news services, the popular press, and websites from across the former Soviet Union via its Artefact interface.
Finally, over the course of the spring semester East View will be rolling out its new multilingual Jewish Studies Research Collection, which includes the searchable full text of the personal dossiers of Jewish emigrants from Soviet Ukraine (1926-1930), archival materials relating to Ukrainian Jewish charitable societies (1857-1929), nearly 18,000 pages of materials from the Kyiv chapter of the Russian Empire’s Society for the Propagation of Education among Jews (1850-1919), and much more. The University of Illinois Library was the first in the country to purchase this important new research tool.
Kit Condill is a Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian at the University Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.