Of all the research questions I’m asked on a daily basis, the ones about historical newspapers and journals stand out to me the most. Since the advent of digital archives has made full-text searching easier, periodicals are becoming a go-to primary source for scholars at all stages of their research, but students of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia will often find that their access to digital tools is somewhat more limited. This means we have to spend a lot of time navigating catalog records, microfilm, bibliographies, and indexes, often learning on the fly as the research progresses. Knowing that this is a frequent roadblock that people encounter, next week I am offering a workshop on searching for these kinds of resources. Students in any discipline wishing to improve their Slavic research skills are welcome to attend – as are faculty and staff who feel they could use a refresher!
In addition to the workshop, I encourage you to check out a trial resource while it’s still available: Brill’s Soviet Cinema Online, providing access to cinema periodicals published from 1918-1942. Brill has long published microfilm collections with incredible research value, and has gradually transitioned many of those collections online. The Soviet Cinema collection is no exception, containing significant titles that aren’t otherwise represented in Yale’s collection and providing more convenient access than a microfilm copy normally would.
The search function does not support transliteration, but you can perform lemmatized searches by using a wildcard (?). So, if you want to search for all the forms of the word “государство,” for example, the search “государств?” will bring up results with different possible endings.
This trial will be available to the Yale community until October 16, so please feel free to ask questions or write feedback to me at anna.arays@yale.edu. I hope to see many of you on the 8th!