PACSLAV Meeting Minutes, September, 1998
Pacific Coast Slavic & East European Library Consortium (PacSlav)
Annual Meeting: September 25, 1998, Boca Raton, Fla.
Minutes
Present: Wojciech Zalewski (Chair; Stanford), Ruth Wallach (U. Southern California), Allan Urbanic (UC Berkeley), Michael Biggins (U. Washington)
Absent: Leon Ferder (UCLA), Mike Markiw (U. Arizona/Arizona State), Mischa Buczkowski (U. Oregon), Patricia Polansky (U. Hawaii), Jack McIntosh (U. British Columbia)
1) New program emphases and areas of library development.
a) Stanford: recent major acquisitions include a 4,600-title collection of Russian children's literature, 1940s-1960s, which has been cataloged; "Post-Perestroika miscellaneous imprints" is the subject heading that Stanford has devised to provide access in its catalog to its collection of Russian fugitive materials from the late 1980s and 1990s, including some samizdat, ephemeral newspapers, erotica, occult and pseudo-religion, and gay publications; the subject heading "Russian 1990s popular culture serials" identifies an interdisciplinary collection including samples of glossy journals. Both collections exclude political literature. Stanford is in the process of acquiring on microfilm the regional pamiatnye knizhki (directories and data sources) as source material for European Russia covering the period 1900 to 1917. Stanford reported that it currently has no specialist on the faculty in literatures outside of Russia; but its East European history and political science programs are strong.
b) Berkeley: a new generation of faculty is placing a new set of demands on the library, including: Czech and Slovak sociology; youth in post-communist societies; Soviet Russian history (a shift from the previous pre-1917 emphasis); and post-1945 Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The Slavic languages/literatures department now emphasizes alternative Russian literature (e.g., women's, children's literature), along with the traditional genres, and the library has acquired materials to match: Russian women's journals (microfilm, Norman Ross); Russian women writers (microfiche, Russian National Library). Microfiche titles from the National Library were identified using the Muratova pre-1917 bibliography and the Dictionary of Russian women writers, and are searchable in Berkeley's online catalog by their series title "Russian women writers microfilm collection." A grant received by the Center in support of Caucasus studies allocates $5,000 for each of two years to acquire any materials pertaining to the Caucasus; priority items will be microfilm backfiles of each country's newspaper of national record and one news weekly per country. The Center's library allocation for consortial acquisitions will now be matched by additional Library funds.
c) Washington: Political Science is looking ahead to the 1999 Russian elections, for which the library will acquire party programs, newspapers, posters, and other semi-ephemeral publications. The Library is supporting a project by graduate students in Geography to create a unique digital map of Russia containing socio-economic data down to the rayon level (this has involved acquisition of oblast-level Goskomstat (Russian Statistical Administration) handbooks for the mid-1990s); see http://128.95.104.228/data/russianfed/. The Slavic languages department is broadening its curriculum to include courses on Slavic cultures: a resulting library priority is to build the video collection of Slavic/East European films and the print collection of materials about film. Fund-raising for a chair of Baltic studies is nearly complete and already translates into broad library commitments for Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian.
d) U. Southern California: is in the midst of an archival project involving the collection of one of their faculty (John Bowlt), a specialist in Russian theater art. The collection includes books on Russian theater, posters, tickets, recordings, and other materials.
2) Book and serial exchanges:
Stanford reported that its Russian exchanges are not playing a significant role in the acquisitions process; the ex-Yugoslav exchanges, by contrast, are reviving. Washington's Serbian, Montenegrin and Slovenian exchanges work very well; Macedonian moderately well; and Croatian haphazardly (Academy Library in Zagreb is strong; National Library is not); a good vendor is needed for Bosnia. It was suggested that Washington might advise Berkeley on Slovenian acquisitions avenues apart from current exchange partners. Baltics: Berkeley has multiple exchanges with haphazard receipts; Berkeley buys Estonian materials for UC Santa Barbara and seeks a functioning vendor for Estonia. Stanford has a good supplier of Latvian and Lithuanian imprints in Riga. A further suggestion was made that for each country (or, in the case of Russia, region or major city) 2-4 PacSlav libraries might begin to use a single good bookdealer to acquire the basics, in order to help keep the dealer afloat.
3) Cataloging:
all libraries in the Consortium are in need of Hungarian cataloging expertise and would welcome it anywhere in the group. UCLA is about to hire a new cataloger, who may bring skills otherwise missing in the group. For Central Asian, ATC (vendor) supplies cataloging with materials and does a good job.
4) Microfilm:
Primary Resources Russian archival materials on microfilm-extensive collections of thematically arranged documents from a variety of major Russian archives. PacSlav should determine whether any of these should be held within the Consortium. Members will request sample reels from Primary Resources for evaluation.
5) PacSlav home page:
it was agreed that the Consortial Web pages would be redesigned to make them more usable by our faculty and students.
6) Tallinn Conference on Libraries and Open Society, 1999:
it was agreed that PacSlav would work up a panel proposal for the Tallinn conference. Ruth Wallach will be PacSlav's liaison to the organizing committee.
7) Follow-up to 1997 IREX Russian Far East conference in Seattle:
it was agreed that PacSlav would author a proposal for an IREX short-term grant to explore acquisitions options in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. Biggins and Polansky will develop the proposal.
Recorded by: Michael Biggins