Moving online

At the time of writing, the University Library remains open (with reading rooms shut) but it will close its doors to readers at 5pm today until further notice.  Given the situation, it seems rather perverse to promote print material through this blog until the UL is fully operational again.  Over the next few weeks, our posts will instead focus on books, journals, and databases which are available electronically, certainly to University staff and students.

Images from Digitalia

Images from Torrossa

Images from De Gruyter

Last September, I wrote a blog post about foreign-language ebook packages, whose details it might be useful for readers to remind themselves about now: https://europeancollections.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/foreign-language-ebooks/

The Library’s FAQs about library services during the Coronavirus outbreak can be found here: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/coronavirus-faqs

We wish all our readers good health.

Mel Bach

New electronic resources with a European connection

The ejournals@cambridge blog publicises trial access to and purchase of various databases and ejournals, and it is certainly a blog worth following.  Several purchases over the last few months complement our European collections, so this post gives an overview.  The subjects of these new resources span philology, politics, art history, theology, migration studies, history, and bibliography, and their contents are in English and various European languages.

Composite of samples of ephemera from the Euromaidan Protests database

Trial access to ‘Krokodil’, ‘Russkaia literatura’, and the Dostoevsky Research Series

Three new East View e-resources have been made available on trial, including the backfiles of the satirical magazine Krokodil and the literary journal Russkaia literatura.  In addition, we are also trying out a Russian e-book set, with trial access to the Dostoevskii : materialy i issledovaniia.  Feedback is keenly sought by Friday 1 May, to slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Krokodil front covers – screenshot from the East View database.

Archives numériques de la Révolution française

The Archives numériques de la Révolution française (the French Revolution Digital Archive), a collaboration between the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, gives us an opportunity to highlight how online resources are enriching and supplementing the collections of libraries in Cambridge.

Screen shot of Archives numériques.

The goal of the Archives numériques de la Révolution française is to “produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française“.

‘Sovetskaia kul’tura’ digital archive

Thanks to strong support from academics and students following the February blog post advertising trial access to the Sovetskaia kul'tura digital archive, the University Library's Accessions Committee agreed to purchase permanent access to the archive, with financial support from money left to the Library by Dr Catherine Cooke.  The purchase was made later in the spring, but it is only in the last few weeks that the digital archive has been fully updated from the pre-purchase state it had been in.

Screenshot of the philately section of the 25 June 1964 issue of Sovetskaia kul’tura.

The archive contains as full a set as East View have so far been able to amass of the various titles under which the current weekly newspaper Kul'tura has been published.  The earliest title was Rabochii i iskusstvo (Worker and art), which started in 1929, followed by Sovetskoe iskusstvo (Soviet art); this title ran from 1931-1953, with the exception of some of 1942-1944 when Literatura i iskusstvo (Literature and art) was used instead), and Sovetskaia kul'tura (Soviet culture; this ran to 1991, after which the current name, Kul'tura (Culture), was adopted).  Any gaps in the collection are detailed within each title's main page, but East View assure us that the search for all remaining copies and also for better copies of issues which have scanned poorly will continue.  As with other East View digital archives, the Sovetskaia kul'tura archive contains scanned pages which are text-searchable in Cyrillic and in transliteration.