Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects

Our Criteria | What defines a digital project? | What is not a digital project?

Our Criteria

Goal

We want to include as many valuable projects as possible in the inventory, but keep it to manageable proportions. See the brief summary of how the inventory addresses each of the original oppositions in the charge.

We have already decided that, as a basic criterion, all projects must have content that deals with Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies in the humanities and social sciences. Must content deal primarily with Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies? For example, the Online Library of Literature has only three texts from our field—all Tolstoy works. Does it warrant inclusion? What about eScholarship Editions? These and other sites whose content is not primarily in our field are provisionally included but with notes. If the goal of the inventory is to avoid duplication of effort in digitization, then they are probably worth including.

But questions remain regarding the geographic scope as well as the definition of a digital project.

Medium

Projects may be made available on a publically accessible Web site, restricted-access Web site, private network, CD-ROM, or by a computer program. In short, the medium will not disqualify a project as long as the medium is in some way electronic.

Geographic scope

Content

We will include projects whose content deals with Slavic, East European, and Eurasian countries or residents of them. Should we also include materials with a focus on emigre communities outside these countries? The project itself may be created, hosted, or funded from outside these countries.
Provenance

We will identify projects by the location of the creator(s)—as opposed to publishers or distributors—whether they are individuals or corporate bodies. Projects with more than one creator will be labeled with locations for all creators. Institutional affiliations will be given for individual creators to allow searching by institution. Therefore, we will be able to search for creators by name (individual or corporate), institutional affiliation, city, state/province, and country.

[An example of a project with complex geographic provenance—though not within the scope of our inventory—is the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Its creators (the general editors) are located in Maryland, California, New York, and Missouri. They are affiliated with institutions in those states, except for the editor in Missouri, who is affiliated with the University of Maryland. Furthermore, the project is distributed by (uses a server at) the University of Virginia.]

But we still have two questions:
1. The draft charge says that the inventory will cover projects in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, Western Europe, and North America. However, we feel that we should not exclude projects on Slavic, East European, and Eurasian themes whose creator(s) is/are located in another part of the world. Are there any objections to this?
2. Will we include projects for which the creator is in a Slavic, East European, or Eurasian country but the content is not about Slavic, East European, or Eurasian studies? Some hypothetical examples:
  - a project at Tula State University that is digitizing an English-language entomology journal
  - a project at Tula State University that is digitizing a Russian-language entomology journal
  - a project in Poznan that is digitizing an English-language journal printed in the UK about English literature
  - a project in Poznan that is digitizing an English-language journal printed in Poland about English literature
  - a project in Poznan that is digitizing a Polish-language journal printed in the UK about English literature
  - a project in Poznan that is digitizing a Polish-language journal printed in Poland about English literature

What is a digital project?

We propose to include only projects that display at least aspect of the "digital process". This allows us to exclude the many websites that contain valuable information on Eastern Europe and Eurasia but should not be considered digital projects.

· Digital projects (collections)—to be included by current criteria

What is not a digital project?

The above criteria would exclude projects that lack a component of the "digital process."