Introduction
Crimea is a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. In 1783, Crimea became a part of the Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Crimea became an autonomous republic within the USSR. Following World War II, Crimea was changed to the Crimean Oblast. In 1954, it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR. In 1991, Ukraine was reestablished as an independent state and most of the peninsula was reorganized as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Russia formally annexed Crimea on March 18, 2014, incorporating the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol as federal subjects of the Russian Federation.
The main languages are Ukrainian, Russian and Crimean Tatar. The latter belongs to the Southern Turkic languages. Before 1929, it was based on an Arabic script, followed by a period of the Latin script which was replaced by a Cyrillic script in 1938. In 1997, the Latin script was revived again, which is used alongside the Cyrillic alphabet.
Sources: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia V.16 pp. 159-162, 169; The Columbia Gazetteer of the World, Ethnologue.
Below is a preliminary guide to resources available for researchers with focus on Crimea. In addition, the digital tools at the National Library of Ukraine might provide additional coverage.
Krymskaia respublikanskaia universal’naia nauchnaia biblioteka im. I. Ia. Franko
The Crimean scientific library is a multifunctional information center with an impressive collection that comprises approx. a million of items. The library has an online catalog and an online catalog of local materials.
Catalogs
Elektronnyi catalog (period of coverage: 1893 – present) combines different types of catalogs (alphabetical, systematic, subject, systematic list of journal articles) and includes bibliographic information about print materials (books, albums, atlases), periodicals, dissertation abstracts, online and rare materials.
Elektronnyi svodnyi kraevedcheskii katalog Respubliki Krym (period of coverage: 1917 – present)
The union catalog’s structure is similar to the online catalog but is different in content as it holds only materials dedicated to the history of Crimea. Below is a sample search result from the online catalog.
There are several types of search options: standard (searches by key words, author, title, year of publication), advanced (by subject, topic, type of material, ISSN/ISBN; see below) as well as several navigator tools (dictionary, list or terms, key words, topics).
Respublikanskaia krymskotatarskaia biblioteka im. I. Gasprinskogo
The library was opened in 1990 and since then, its main goal has been to collect and preserve materials in Crimean Tatar language or by Crimean Tatar authors or about Crimean Tatars. Today its collection has more than 52,000 print items alongside with photocopies of rare historic books, microfilm collection of newspapers and Crimean Tatar books published before the deportation in 1944. The collection is described in a variety of paper catalogs which are being transferred to an online database.
Elektronnyi katalog has several search modes: standard, advanced, professional and shared, with an option of choosing other libraries’ catalogs:
Below is an example of a standard search by keyword:
Katalog knig na iazykakh narodov RF i stran SNG
The Russian National Library has an online catalog of books in national languages of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It contains records for the materials acquired by the Library after 2000, with plans to expand the database in the future to include materials before 2000. The catalog can be searched by all the standard options (author, title, subject, ISBN etc) and by language of the document. The following search returned 19 titles in Crimean Tatar:
Katalog literatury na krymsko-tatarskom yazyke [microform].
Rossiĭskai︠a︡ nat︠s︡ionalʹnai︠a︡ biblioteka. Otdel literatury na nat︠s︡ionalʹnykh i︠a︡zykakh. New York : N. Ross, 1997. U of I Library Call Number: MFICHE 016.94771 R736k International and Area Studies Library. U of I record. OCLC Accession Number: 702570269.
The Russian National Library’s Department of Literature in National Languages (also known as the Department of National Literatures) of the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Baltic countries has reproduced holdings catalogs in microfiche format. The imprints catalogs diffuse most of the difficulties associated with transliteration in the vernacular languages, spelling, forms of entry, and uncertainties with the entirety of the collection. Researchers can access the entire holdings for a specific language at the Russian National Library through the microfiche set; conveniently exporting selected titles via .pdf scans. The catalog of literature in Crimean Tatar contains holdings of all Crimean Tatar imprints located in the National Library of Russia. It is arranged in alphabetical order by author/title. The following scans reflect some of the Crimean Tatar-language holdings from the catalog:
Archives
The history of the archival services in Crimea dates back to 1919 with initial focus on collecting documents from liquidated pre-revolutionary institutions. In 1926, materials were divided into two archives: the Historic Archive and the Archive of the October Revolution. Today there are two archival institutions: the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea and the State Archive of Personnel of the Republic of Crimea. The State Archive houses more than 7,000 collections (period of coverage: 1783 – present). Description of the collections is available in .pdf format and is arranged as follows:
- List of collections of archival materials of Communist party organizations
- List of collections of pre-revolutionary archival materials
- List of collections of Soviet era archival materials
The website also provides information about local archival institutions in Crimea as well as a description of their collections:
The UIUC Library has the following two print guides to archival materials in Crimea:
Gosudarstvennyĭ arkhiv Respubliki Krym: Putevoditelʹ / Redakt︠s︡ionnai︠a︡ kollegii︠a︡: O.V. Lobov, T.A. Sharova, L.S. Sobotinskai︠a︡, N.A. Kravchenko. Simferopol’ : AntikvA, 2016. U of I Library Call Number: 947.71 Sh236g U of I record. ISBN: 9785990917699
Volume 1 includes collections from pre-Revolutionary period. Information about each collection includes its number, category, title, volume, short annotation and dates of the documents . Below is an entry about a social services collection:
Krymskiĭ oblastnoĭ gosudarstvennyĭ arkhiv : putevoditelʹ / pod obshcheĭ redakt︠s︡ieĭ A.D. Belikovoĭ, A.A. Stepanovoĭ. Simferopol’ : Krymizdat, 1961. U of I Library Call Number: 947.76 K94K U of I record. OCLC Accession Number: 37582688
The guide covers collections of materials from pre-Revolutionary period as well as Revolutionary and Soviet (until 1959) periods. Collections’ information includes title, annotation, number and dates of documents. Below is an entry on professional unions’ collections:
Online Resources
Literaturnyi mir Rossii is a guide for literature and local online resources dedicated to Russian regions from the Russian National Library. Information about literary museums, journals and notable people in Crimea can be found here: http://nlr.ru/res/litkarta/cat_show.php?rid=8036