Transcript Electronic resources for Slavonic and East European Studies

Electronic resources
for Slavonic and East
European Studies
Nick Hearn Hilary 2007
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Structure of the session
Transliteration and keyboards
Search engines and portals
Electronic resources. What? Where?
Full-text journal articles
Examples of some searches
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Slavonic and East European
resources can be different

Transliteration


Historical reasons
Keyboards

Variety of lay-outs, diacritics
…but some problems are universal…
 Transience



‘Dead links’, timed out, site down, restrictions on
numbers of users etc
Quality

Lack of gate-keepers such as publishers, bias,
erroneous and irritating pop-ups
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Transliteration
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Transliteration: why do we
need it?
 Library catalogues
 Email
BUT
increasingly online catalogues are becoming searchable
in Cyrillic…



COPAC http://copac.ac.uk/
British Library http://www.bl.uk/
Oxford (new OLIS will be searchable in Cyrillic)
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Transliteration is the transposition of the
characters of one orthography into the
character set of another
Criteria for the ideal transliteration
scheme
 No external knowledge required (or imparted)
 One-to-one correspondence between characters
mechanical, reversible
 Conforming as far as possible to orthography of target
language
 Standard - only two transliterations per language pair
(or language family?!)
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French (non-)transliteration scheme
URL: (French wikipedia page on Cyrillic transliteration):
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription__du_russe_en_fran%C3%A7ais
 External knowledge required: NOT reversible
 NO one-to-one correspondence
Example: Долгирева becomes…
Dolguireva in French transcription of Russian
Example: Hearn becomes …
Хирн, Херн, Хёрн in Russian transcription of English
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Shostakovich becomes…
 Chostakovitch (French)
 Schostakowitsch (German)
 Sjostakovitj (Swedish)
 Sosztakovics (Hungarian)
 Šostakovič (Czech)
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Library of Congress transliteration is the worst form of
transliteration (except for all the others that have been
tried from time to time)
Library of Congress transliteration
URL:
http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/katmandu/sgman/trrus.html
Pros of LC:
One-to-one correspondence between characters/character groups and
Cyrillic characters
Cons of LC:
Non-orthographic, outlandish ligatures and easily forgotten about
diacritics
Useful solution:
Online transliterators:
For Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian: http://www.translit.ru
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Keyboards
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Keyboards

URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Hungary

Russian

Phonetic or ‘homophonic’
 See for example Paul Gor’s site:

URL:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/
Pros and cons
Standard Russian
 Pros and cons




Czech
Hungarian
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Encodings
 CP-1251

“Code page” used by Microsoft
 KOI8-R

“Kod obmena informatsiei 8-bit
 Used
on most Russian web-sites
 Unicode
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Putting it all together

Searching National Library catalogues (current)

University of Queensland. National Library Catalogues
Worldwide


Searching National Library Catalogues (retrospective

General’nyi alfavitnyi katalog knig na russkom iazyke (17251998) Russian National Library


http://www.nlr.ru:8101/e-case/search_extended.php
Generální katalog (National Library of the Czech Republic)


http://www.library.uq.edu.au/natlibs/html
http://katif.nkp.cz/Katalogy.aspx
Searching elsewhere on the Internet
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Search engines
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Search engines: how they
differ
 Scope

Geographical, file types
 Search types
Phrase searching, simple vs complex search, searching
by date, field searching (title, domain, image), limiting
 Search syntax
 Boolean, truncation, proximity searching

 Update frequency
 Presentation of results

Word frequency, link popularity, click popularity, pay for
placement
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Types of Russian/Slavonic
search engines
 Meta search engine

Example: http://www.metabot.ru
 Local search engines

‘Search Engines Worldwide’
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com
 Three Russian search engines

Rambler, Yandex and Aport
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Three Russian search engines
 Rambler

http://www.rambler.ru
 Yandex

http://yandex.ru
 Aport

http://www.aport.ru
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Portals
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Portals: a definition
An authoritative site that provides an
organized list of selected web-sites and
other resources in a particular subject
area
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Portals for Slavonic studies: some examples

Personal


Benjamin Sher’s web-site (for Russian)







British Library:
 http://www.bl.uk/collections/easteuropean/slavonicinternet.html
Bucknell university library Slavonic and East European pages
http://www.bucknell.edu/x983.xml
OxLIP http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip/
Taylor Bodleian Slavonic and Modern Greek Library
http://www.taslib.ox.ac.uk
Interdisciplinary


http://www.websher.net/inx/icdefault1.htm
Institutional:


Jim Naughton’s website (for Czech)
 http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/
HUMBUL http://www.humbul.ac.uk/
Other

CEEOL (Central and East European Online Library) (on OxLIP
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What and where
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Putting it all together: what and
where
 Projects
 Interpersonal sites
 Reference
 Blogs, wikis, podcasts
 Full-text
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Full text
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Full text
 Newspapers
 Journal articles
 Reference
 E-books
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Full-text newspapers
 Online
 Eastview Russian newspapers
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Full-text journal articles:
Where?
 On the Web
 On OxLIP


TD-Net
CEEOL
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Bibliographical databases for current journal
articles
For journal articles (mostly) in ‘Western’ languages
 ABSEES
 OCLC First Search

ArticleFirst, MLA, ECO
 EBSEES
 Web of Knowledge
For journal articles in Russian
 Russian Bibliography (Eastview) (On OxLIP)

Letopis’ zhurnal’nykh statei
 INION RAN
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Bibliographical databases for
retrospective journal articles
 For ‘Western’ articles: JSTOR (On
OxLIP)
 For Russian articles: Letopis’
zhurnal’nykh statei,
1955-1975)
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E-books
 Lib.Ru: Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova
http://www.lib.ru/
 Fundamental'naia elektronnaia biblioteka "Russkaia
literatura i fol'klor"
http://feb-web.ru/
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Conclusion
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Conclusion
 Expansion in electronic resources for Slavonic Studies
 Search possibilities are improving
 OxLIP AND the Internet
 Electronic AND Text
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