Every month, the Library of Congress publishes new additions and changes to their subject headings (LCSH). The October 2023 list of approved changes focused on Ukraine, and this post gives a quick summary of them. They all relate to the events of 2013 and 2014 onwards, to the present day.
Continue reading “Changes to Ukraine-related bibliographic subject headings”
Newly received books always show in the catalogue the day after they’ve been unpacked (and can be requested via the Reading Room), which allows the Slavonic team to manage a deliberate cataloguing backlog before final records are produced. This allows time for cataloguers elsewhere, particularly in North American libraries, to produce good-quality records that we can import and use. Today, for example, I catalogued and classified 13 Ukrainian arrivals from the summer, largely published in 2023, that I could now use external records for, allowing far quicker processing than what we call “original cataloguing” (ie cataloguing from scratch). Images of the front covers of these titles, which cover history, politics, fiction (including a title about the terrible events in Bucha in 2022), architecture, culture, philosophy, film, and language studies, are provided in the post, followed by links to their records. Continue reading “Ukrainian summer arrivals”
As the latest newsletters from our department and from the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group show, the questions of how best [a] to handle and catalogue and [b] instruct our readers about the offensive material in our libraries is a very live one. Of *course* we have such material – research libraries inevitably acquire titles that represent the negative aspects of the world our academics and students research and not only the positive ones. A big issue lies in making sure that our readers understand that the presence of a particular book or other item in Cambridge collections does not equate with the endorsement of its contents by library or academic staff.
This issue has been in my mind as I’ve been undertaking the distasteful task of selecting and cataloguing various pro-war Russian books (all ebooks, since they are easier to buy at the moment than print books). It would be easiest of all not to buy them in either form, but it is important that our readers can see what is being published in Russia during the all-out war against Ukraine, to get a feeling for the kinds of material being pushed at the Russian reading public. Continue reading “Offensive purchases : ebooks in favour of the Russian war against Ukraine”
Cambridge University Library is delighted to have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and invites applications for PhD studentships, starting in October 2024. The successful PhD candidate will receive funding to work on the Stefan Heym Archive, as part of the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) with the University of Oxford. Continue reading “Funding opportunity for a PhD on German author Stefan Heym: the UL’s Stefan Heym Archive “
Cambridge University Library is delighted to have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and invites applications for PhD studentships, starting in October 2024. The successful PhD candidate will receive funding to work on the Spanish chapbooks collections, as part of the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) with the University of Oxford.
Continue reading “Funding opportunity for a PhD on Spanish chapbooks : the culture of their time and modern digital description”This morning, I had the satisfaction of solving the problem of a missing Ukrainian book. It hadn’t been missing in the normal library sense of not being on the shelf. Instead it was entirely missing from the catalogue.
A little while ago, a colleague sent me a few photos of covers of Ukrainian literature and history books in the University Library, and among them was this:
I looked up in the catalogue what I saw on the cover – Tvory [Works] by Leonyd Hlibiv. Nothing came up, so I tried to think about what mistakes previous cataloguers might have made, eg Tvori by Leonid Glibiv if they had applied Russian Cyrillic transliteration rules to the Ukrainian Cyrillic here. Again, no results, so then I tried Hlibov (a common version of his name, still in Ukrainian) and then Glibov to cover that version if misidentified as Russian. Nothing. So then I tried the publisher – Si︠a︡ĭvo (a lovely word meaning shining or glittering). Again, no luck. Continue reading “Locating Hlibiv’s ‘Tvory’ : the April 2023 Slavonic item of the month”
Much of the time, we are able to use catalogue records put together in other major libraries for books that are new to Cambridge, but sometimes we need to do the full cataloguing work ourselves, as has been the case with two recent Ukrainian arrivals.
Both books are 2022 publications from the L’viv Ivan Franko National University, an excellent publisher whose books we frequently buy. Both books are about language – but on very different subjects.
Continue reading “Two newly arrived – and newly described – Ukrainian books in brief”
Readers might remember that one strand of decolonising our collections in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, as outlined in an earlier blog post, was about classification. As explained then and long known by readers using our open-shelf collections, large parts of the UL’s classification system still strongly reflect the times and attitudes of empire. There’s a lot of work to be done here just to tease all the various threads out.
Taking the focus back to Ukraine specifically, I have taken a preliminary look at the Ukrainian component in the “Russian literature” classes – 756 and 757. These classes, meant to contain Russophone literature only, was in practice also the destination for Ukrainophone literature too until the introduction in 2011 of a separate class (758:6) for the latter. There was always a different classmark for “Other Slavonic” (758:8) for languages without their own classmark, but unfortunately Ukrainian appears to have been placed standardly in Russian for decades.
Today’s initial work has been to work out what at least roughly what amount of books it is that we might potentially move, reclassify, and re-label. Here are the initial results.
So far, so relatively straightforward, if still representing quite a lot of work (I think it would be a challenge to deal with one book in 10 minutes, given all the things that would need to happen, so those figures alone would mean 2 weeks full-time as a minimum). What is missing here, though? Continue reading “Decolonising the old classification of Ukrainian literature”
It crossed my mind today to look up in our staff cataloguing system books published in Ukraine and coded as being in Russian, to see whether any of them had been incorrectly coded. The fifth result was exactly that – a Ukrainian title mangled in transliteration performed in keeping with the rules for Russian:
The Ukrainian-Slovak border is 60 miles long and lies largely in the Carpathians. Communities near the border on both sides often reflect in their demographics the ethnic history of the area, with Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Rusyns present. There are also more institution-based signs of this diversity; another 60 miles or so on the Slovak side of the border is the village of Svidník (Свидник/Svydnyk in Ukrainian), where the Museum of Ukrainian Culture is to be found.
Languages across Borders 