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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 http://www.library.uq.edu.au/natlibs/html

Searching National Library Catalogues (retrospective General’nyi alfavitnyi katalog knig na russkom iazyke (1725-

1998) Russian National Library http://www.nlr.ru:8101/e-case/search_extended.php

Generální katalog   (National Library of the Czech Republic) 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 Jim Naughton’s website (for Czech)

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/ Benjamin Sher’s web-site (for Russian)

http://www.websher.net/inx/icdefault1.htm Institutional:

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 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 KnowledgeFor 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