General Sources and Strategies for East European Research

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General Strategies for East European Research

I. Introduction

In order to define the most effective strategy for your research, you will have to do a great deal of work with a wide variety of reference materials. A large part of planning your strategy will be identifying the sources you need and discovering the most efficient and thorough use of those sources. Although it may seem obvious, you should firstly account for the language(s) and dates relevant to a your particular topic, and what kind of resources are available for researching that period. There are certain time periods, like 1855-1876, which have extremely good coverage in the printed sources for Russia, which is not the case for the turn of the century. 

Access to research materials and the historical events that characterized the time in which those materials were published are inextricably related. Those areas that were subject to severe censorship will present unique challenges to the researcher. By the same token, those countries that had “depository laws” for their national libraries, requiring the deposit of at least one copy in a national depository, often present the scholar with unique opportunities. Those countries that lack a national bibliography may force the researcher to find other tools to identify the resources they need.  

II. Types of Sources

How much do you know about the various types of reference sources? Jacques Barzun (The Modern Researchers, 1992), identified the following categories of reference materials: encyclopedias, biographical resources, indexes to periodicals, dictionaries, language dictionaries, handbooks, and bibliographies.  Do you know how to identify and evaluate such sources in the Slavic area for your research? Information about these categories and others can be found at the links below. 

III. Internet Resources

The categories that have been most affected by the internet are perhaps those of dictionaries, indexes to periodicals, and bibliographies. Many resources that in the past required research trips or interlibrary loan requests are now easily accessible online. Periodical indexes have become widely available as well, although their retrospective depth, in most cases is still quite limited.

The line between periodical indexes and bibliographies is in some ways blurred in an electronic environment. Many of the utilities that index large numbers of periodicals can be made to function as bibliographies. Services such as Web of Science and other resources provide a unique avenue to information previously filled by specialized bibliographies. Their search capabilities with functions that allow the scholar to limit to a specific periodical title or by subject combine many of the features of the traditional bibliography. Barzun’s list must also be supplemented with the newer sources that pertain strictly to the electronic research environment: search devices and library catalogs. 

In the days of printed catalogs, access was necessarily limited. Today the use of microform and the internet has made it possible to see many of the catalogs for the world’s greatest libraries remotely. The value for the scholar is enormous. It is now possible to pinpoint those collections in the United States that will be most useful for your research and to make your Interlibrary Loan queries far more efficient by searching for and identifying holdings of exactly what you need before you ever fill out the Interlibrary Loan request at your library. 

Saying that is possible is not at all the same as saying it is easy. The strategy you use to identify the library can be efficient or tremendously time consuming, depending on your knowledge of library catalogs. 

General Sources for East European Research