Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

The World Wide Web offers a variety of resources on Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, many of which are not available elsewhere. Searching the internet for a relevant piece of information, however, can be a cumbersome process and some sites are more worthy of your trust than others. The Evaluating Webpages guide developed by the Duke University Library Reference Department provides simple and straightforward advice on how to determine the quality and legitimacy of information found on the World Wide Web in general.  Once you locate a site you can trust, consult the Columbia Guide to Online Style (also available in hard-copy at the Perkins Reference desk) or Online: a Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources for advice about citing online sources. The following list offers only a sampling of the kind of serious, scholarly material available on the internet to students and scholars of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies:

Russian and East European Studies Virtual Library (University of Pittsburgh)
REESWEB is the most detailed annotated guide yet available to online information resources related to Russian and East European Studies. It is part of the WWW Virtual Library, a collection of detailed subject-oriented guides to Internet resources maintained by topic experts at various sites around the world and coordinated by the WWW Organization (W3O).

Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects (AAASS)
This database of metadata about digital projects was compiled by the Digital Projects Subcomittee of the American Association of the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), a nonprofit, non-political, scholarly society that calls itself the leading private organization in the world dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about the former Soviet Union (including Eurasia) and Eastern and Central Europe. Since its inception in Spring 2003, much of the inventory has migrated to a database, which will continue to be updated and eventually transformed into a registry, that is, and inventory in which collection creators submit their own entries (subject to editing by the maintainer of the registry).

Slavic and East European Language Resource Center (Duke University)
Established in 1999 and operated by Duke University under an initial US Department of Education grant, SEELRC has as its mission the improvement of the national capacity to teach and learn Slavic and East European languages.  The Center hosts a number of on-going scholarly projects, including (1) Language and Culture Through Film: an interactive, multimedia course/course companion for advanced level users of Slavic and East European languages; (2) Reference Grammar Network: a set of parallel grammars of the languages of our world region, written by world experts on that language, and indexed for instantaneous comparison of semantic fields across languages. It also includes supplementary, self-grading exercises for advanced-level users accompany each grammar. The Czech, Macedonian, Russian (with exercises) and Polish grammars are currently available online, with Romanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Georgian available soon. Individual grammars can be downloaded for offline use; (3) Grammatical Dictionaries: A searchable database of full word paradigms with native-speaker examples for each inflection. Each entry includes an English gloss and detailed annotation for semantics and pronunciation variants. The Grammatical Dictionaries for Russian and Czech are currently under development and will be released once they have 5,000 headword entries; (4) Case and Aspect Book Series: complete descriptions of the meanings and uses of all of the cases in a given language (for example, nominative, genitive, dative, etc.), plus various verbal phenomena relating to aspect (the use of perfective and imperfective verbs, plus verbs of motion, etc.), written in an accessible style, and illustrated with authentic examples drawn from an extensive database representing a variety of genres and topics. Selected draft and sample chapters of the Case Books for Czech and Russian are currently available; and (5) Russian, East European, and Central Asian Webliographies compiled by Dr. Bogdan B. Sagatov.

Herron Guide to Politics in East Central Europe and Eurasia (University of Kansas)
Created by Eric Herron, the director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Kansas, this site's goal is to help facilitate research on the politics and economics of transition states in the post-communist world. There are thousands of links to governmental and non-governmental web sites based in post-communist states, download-able fonts, and other resources. The site can be navigated by country or thematically.

CentralAsianVoices (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
An interactive multilingual website that features timely analysis of political, economic, social and security developments in the five states of Central Asia.  The website is produced by the Carnegie Endowment under the direction of Dr. Martha Brill Olcott.  Includes links to "Government Voices," "Media Voices," "Blogger Voices," as well as "Documents in the News" and "Research and Analysis."  Individuals may also sign up for a RSS feed to receive updates when the content of this site changes.

Zhurnal'nyi Zal
An online gateway to open-source Russian literary journals, including current and select back issues of many major Russian-language "thick journals," such as Novyi mir, Oktiabr', Neva, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,  Vestnik Evropy, and Zvezda; also sponsors publication of original projects.  For full text of current and back issues of these and other Russian periodical titles, consult the Duke University catalog under "EastView Universal Database of Humanities and Social Science Periodicals," which is available to Duke affiliates only.  In addition to the titles available in Zhurnal'nyi zal, researchers may wish to consult other open-source Slavic E-journals, such as: Ab imperio < http://abimperio.net/>; Folklorica <http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/SEEFA/archive.HTM>; Journal of power institutions in post-Soviet societies <http://www.pipss.org>; KinoKultura <http://www.kinokultura.com/>; Oral Tradition <http://journal.oraltradition.org/>; Sovremennaia russkaia literatura: Kuritsyn Weekly <http://www.guelman.ru/slava/>; Spaces of Identity <http://bibpurl.oclc.org/web/5462>; Takaya <http://www.takaya.by/>; Toronto Slavic Quarterly <http://bibpurl.oclc.org/web/1740>; and Teksty drugie  <http://www.ibl.waw.pl/index.php?strona=212>. 

Datenbank Infosystem (University of Regensburg, Germany)
Open-source links to Russian-, German-, and English-language scholary websites on Slavic studies, including the Analytical Database of the The Bakhtin Centre; Athena-Authors & Texts; Aufsatzdatenbank Osteuropa; Baza bibliografij vydajuscichsja sovremennikov; Bibliograficeskie Bazy Dannych INION po Socialnym i Gumanitarnym Naukam; Bibliographie der deutschsprachigen Slavistik 1983-1992 (BibDatSlav); de-iure-pl: Deutsch-Polnische Gesetz-Datenbank; eBdb; Guide Books to Russian Archives; Internationale Volkskundliche Bibliographie Online; Katalog of the Martin-Opitz-Bibliothek; Letopis Zurnalnych Statej (1954-1975); Literaturdokumentation zur Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas; Multilingual E-Translation Portal; Nacionalnyj Korpus Russkogo Jazyka;  Neuerwerbungen der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek/Sondersammelgebiet Osteuropa; Olbislav; OstNet; Polska Bibliografia Literacka; Pushkin Collection of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies; REESWeb; Russische Kultur und Gender Studies; Russkaja Literatura i Folklor ; Verbundkatalog Östliches Europa; Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Osteuropa; Wortschatz; YourDictionary.com; and Zurnalnyi Zal.

EuroDocs
A portal to European primary historical documents, which has recently expanded to include all of Europe.  As a gated Wiki, EuroDocs relies for its data on historians, archivists, librarians, and others who are aware of the primary sources of a given European country - in facsimile, transcription, or English translation - and who can weave them into the portal (in a chronological order for each country). 

ScientificCommons.org (Institute for Media and Communications Management, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland):
ScientificCommons.org aims to provide comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge (broadly defined to include social science and the humanities) on the internet.  This website offers a single searchable interface that allows users to search the rapidly growing number of open access sites and electronic archives that allow the free (within copyright limits) distribution of their materials.  Currently indexes about 13 million scientific publications in various file formats (PDF, PowerPoint, RTF, Microsoft Word and Postscript) with a maximum size of 3MB. Researchers interested in receiving notification about new publications may sign up for their RSS Feed service, which can be customized by discipline or by keywords.

Core Metalist of Open Access Eprint Archives
This site lists and comments on other lists of individual and institutional e-print archives, that is, digital archives that provide free access to research output, often in the form of pre-print copies of journal articles. E-print archives can be arranged by subject or by institution. This list and its categorisation gives a broad overview of the structure, size, and progress of full-text open access e-print archives.  The original, annotated version of this metalist was written by Steve Hitchcock, Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, Southampton University, and appeared as the "Metalist of Open Access E-Print Archives: The Genesis of Institutional Archives and Independent Services," in ARL Bimonthly Report, No. 227, April 2003.  For a description of and links to more recent e-print archives, see the list compiled by the librarians at Durham University, UK.