American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

Bibliography & Documentation (B & D) Committee home
Subcommittee on Digital Projects

Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects

How the inventory relates to the charge

The May 2, 2003, charge suggested a number of oppositions that should be addressed by an inventory. The original oppositions are listed in bold with comments explaining how the inventory will deal with these distinctions.

1. Types of projects

   1. Reformatting v. "new model" (born-digital) scholarship. The inventory will include both reformatting projects and born-digital scholarship, but the only born-digital resources that will be included are those which use descriptive markup.
   2. Single-text/single-format corpus v. multifaceted archive (texts, images, audio). The inventory will include projects with resources in any format.
   3. Primary v secondary sources. The inventory will include projects with primary sources, secondary sources, or both, as well as reformatted bibliographic sources. (Born-digital bibliographic sources are not included.)
   4. Full-text (historical, literary) v. indexing/bibliographic. Full-text sources are always included unless they are born-digital and do not use descriptive markup. Indexes and bibliographic sources are only included if they are reformatted from non-digital originals.
   5. Text v. numeric/multimedia. Projects delivering text are always included unless the sources are born-digital and do not use descriptive markup. Numeric data is excluded only when in a database. Multimedia projects are always included.
   6. Freely-accessible v. fee-based. No project is excluded purely because a fee may be charged for access. However, purely commercial ventures are excluded.
   7. Internet-based v Intranet (password)-based. Any project in digital form is eligible for inclusion.
   8. CD-ROMS: networked v non-networked. Any project in digital form is eligible for inclusion.
   9. Access v preservation. Projects are included that have goals of providing access, preserving materials, allowing for scholarly analysis, or any combination. Only purely commercial ventures are excluded.
   10. Academic versus commercial. Purely commercial ventures are normally not included in the inventory; however, parternships among libraries, non-profits, and commercial organizations are eligible for inclusion even though they have a commercial component.

2. Geographic provenance

   The group will begin by considering coverage of projects taking place in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and in Western Europe, as well as in North America. The inventory will include projects whose content deals with Slavic, East European, and Eurasian countries or residents of them. The project itself may be created, funded, or hosted outside these countries. We have not yet decided whether to include materials with a focus on emigre communities outside these countries.