Electronic resources for Slavonic and East European Studies

1
Electronic resources for Slavonic and East
European Studies

• Nick Hearn Hilary 2007

2
Structure of the session

• Transliteration and keyboards
• Search engines and portals
• Electronic resources. What? Where?
• Full-text journal articles
• Examples of some searches

3
Slavonic and East European resources can be
different

• Transliteration
• Historical reasons
• Keyboards
• Variety of lay-outs, diacritics
• but some problems are universal
• Transience
• Dead links, timed out, site down, restrictions
  on numbers of users etc
• Quality
• Lack of gate-keepers such as publishers, bias,
  erroneous and irritating pop-ups

4
Transliteration
5
Transliteration why do we need it?

• Library catalogues
• Email
• BUT increasingly online catalogues are becoming
  searchable in Cyrillic
• COPAC http//copac.ac.uk/
• British Library http//www.bl.uk/ 
• Oxford (new OLIS will be searchable in Cyrillic)

6
Transliteration is the transposition of the
characters of one orthography into the character
set of another

• Criteria for the ideal transliteration scheme
• No external knowledge required (or imparted)
• One-to-one correspondence between characters
• mechanical, reversible
• Conforming as far as possible to orthography of
  target
• language
• Standard - only two transliterations per language
  pair
• (or language family?!)

7
French (non-)transliteration scheme

• URL (French wikipedia page on Cyrillic
  transliteration)
• http//fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription__du_rus
  se_en_franC3A7ais
• External knowledge required NOT reversible
• NO one-to-one correspondence
• Example ????????? becomes
• Dolguireva in French transcription of Russian
• Example Hearn becomes
• ????, ????, ???? in Russian transcription of
  English

8
Shostakovich becomes

• Chostakovitch (French)
• Schostakowitsch (German)
• Sjostakovitj (Swedish)
• Sosztakovics (Hungarian)
• ostakovic (Czech)

9
Library of Congress transliteration is the worst
form of transliteration (except for all the
others that have been tried from time to time)

• Library of Congress transliteration
• URL http//library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/
  katmandu/sgman/trrus.html 
• Pros of LC
• One-to-one correspondence between
  characters/character groups and Cyrillic
  characters
• Cons of LC
• Non-orthographic, outlandish ligatures and
  easily forgotten about diacritics
• Useful solution
• Online transliterators
• For Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian
  http//www.translit.ru

10
Keyboards
11
Keyboards

• URL http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
  Hungary
• Russian
• Phonetic or homophonic
• See for example Paul Gors site
• URL http//ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Paul
  Gor/
• Pros and cons
• Standard Russian
• Pros and cons
• Czech
• Hungarian

12
Encodings

• CP-1251
• Code page used by Microsoft
• KOI8-R
• Kod obmena informatsiei 8-bit
• Used on most Russian web-sites
• Unicode

13
Putting it all together

• Searching National Library catalogues (current)
• University of Queensland. National Library
  Catalogues Worldwide
• http//www.library.uq.edu.au/natlibs/html
• Searching National Library Catalogues
  (retrospective
• Generalnyi alfavitnyi katalog knig na russkom
  iazyke (1725-1998) Russian National Library
• http//www.nlr.ru8101/e-case/search_extended.php
• Generální katalog   (National Library of the
  Czech Republic)
• http//katif.nkp.cz/Katalogy.aspx
• Searching elsewhere on the Internet

14
Search engines
15
Search engines how they differ

• Scope
• Geographical, file types
• Search types
• Phrase searching, simple vs complex search,
  searching by date, field searching (title,
  domain, image), limiting
• Search syntax
• Boolean, truncation, proximity searching
• Update frequency
• Presentation of results
• Word frequency, link popularity, click
  popularity, pay for placement

16
Types of Russian/Slavonic search engines

• Meta search engine
• Example http//www.metabot.ru
• Local search engines
• Search Engines Worldwide http//www.searchengine
  colossus.com
• Three Russian search engines
• Rambler, Yandex and Aport

17
Three Russian search engines

• Rambler
• http//www.rambler.ru
• Yandex
• http//yandex.ru
• Aport
• http//www.aport.ru

18
Portals
19
Portals a definition

• An authoritative site that provides an organized
  list of selected web-sites and other resources in
  a particular subject area

20
Portals for Slavonic studies some examples

• Personal
• Jim Naughtons website (for Czech)
• http//users.ox.ac.uk/tayl0010/
• Benjamin Shers web-site (for Russian)
• http//www.websher.net/inx/icdefault1.htm
• Institutional
• British Library
• http//www.bl.uk/collections/easteuropean/slavonic
  internet.html
• Bucknell university library Slavonic and East
  European pages
• http//www.bucknell.edu/x983.xml
• OxLIP http//www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip/
• Taylor Bodleian Slavonic and Modern Greek Library
  
• http//www.taslib.ox.ac.uk
• Interdisciplinary
• HUMBUL http//www.humbul.ac.uk/
• Other
• CEEOL (Central and East European Online Library)
  (on OxLIP

21
What and where
22
Putting it all together what and where

• Projects
• Interpersonal sites
• Reference
• Blogs, wikis, podcasts
• Full-text

23
Full text
24
Full text

• Newspapers
• Journal articles
• Reference
• E-books

25
Full-text newspapers

• Online
• Eastview Russian newspapers

26
Full-text journal articles Where?

• On the Web
• On OxLIP
• TD-Net
• CEEOL

27
Bibliographical databases for current journal
articles

• For journal articles (mostly) in Western
  languages
• ABSEES
• OCLC First Search
• ArticleFirst, MLA, ECO
• EBSEES
• Web of Knowledge
• For journal articles in Russian
• Russian Bibliography (Eastview) (On OxLIP)
• Letopis zhurnalnykh statei
• INION RAN

28
Bibliographical databases for retrospective
journal articles

• For Western articles JSTOR (On OxLIP)
• For Russian articles Letopis zhurnalnykh
  statei,
• 1955-1975)

29
E-books

• Lib.Ru Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova http//www.li
  b.ru/ 
• Fundamental'naia elektronnaia biblioteka
  "Russkaia literatura i fol'klor" http//feb-web.r
  u/ 

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Conclusion
31
Conclusion

• Expansion in electronic resources for Slavonic
  Studies
• Search possibilities are improving
• OxLIP AND the Internet
• Electronic AND Text