untitled


‘‘Slavic Studies and Slavic Librarianship’’
Revisited: Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian

AARON TREHUB

Auburn University Libraries, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA

This article revisits the author’s essay in Solanus on the state of
Slavic librarianship at the turn of the twenty-first century in order
to assess how the profession has changed in the interim. Trehub
notes that the single most important effect of the proliferation of
new library information technologies has been a gradual shift in
emphasis from curation to creation. The library may no longer be
the first stop in a student’s research, but it remains the preferred
venue for study, collaboration, social interaction, Internet use,
and access to and help with specialized resources. The job of
librarians—including Slavic librarians—is to build on their
comparative advantage in these areas and re-integrate libraries
into the students’ information workflow. The author suggests that
the best way to maintain Slavic studies’ viability as a discipline is
to participate more fully and be represented more prominently in
the technology-driven scholarly digital initiatives that are trans-
forming librarianship in general.

KEYWORDS Digital scholarship, Slavic studies, information
technology, information literacy, library, libraries

In 2004, after almost twenty years of working as a Slavic studies analyst and
librarian, I traded in my shapka for a NASCAR baseball cap (so to speak) and
accepted a position as the director of library technology at Auburn University
in Alabama. So when the editors of SEEIR first contacted me about revisiting
my 2000 Solanus article

1 for this special issue on Slavic information literacy,
my first reaction was to argue that my defection from the field disqualified
me from commenting on more-recent developments. On reflection—and

170

Address correspondence to Aaron Trehub, Assistant Dean for Technology and Technical
Services, Auburn University Libraries, Auburn University, 231 Mell Street, Auburn, AL 36849,
USA. E-mail: trehuaj@auburn.edu

Slavic & East European Information Resources, 10:170–184, 2009
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1522-8886 print / 1522-9041 online
DOI: 10.1080/15228880903012341



with some persuasion—I decided that my experiences outside Slavic studies
might enable me to shed some light on and bring a different perspective to
some of the issues facing the field today. This is especially true in the area of
library technology, my current area of responsibility.

Before moving on to information technology, information literacy, and
other library matters, I would like to fulfill the retrospective part of my
charge and dwell for a moment on my treatment in the Solanus article of the
development of Slavic Studies and Slavic librarianship in the United States—
in particular, on the crucial importance I ascribed to the Cold War and the
US-Soviet rivalry. This turned out to be an unexpectedly controversial point.
Although one can argue about the degree to which the Cold War and US
government policy shaped the field and helped to build the library
collections that supported it, I believed that my nutshell history of Slavic
studies in the United States was essentially accurate. Others took a different
view, however, including the anonymous peer reviewers for this journal—
which is how the article came to be published in Solanus and not in SEEIR. I
was therefore reassured to see, in the course of researching this piece, that
my chronology and interpretation matched those of Caryl Emerson,
professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, who summarized
the field’s history in an address to the 2002 annual convention of the
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
(AATSEEL). ‘‘The Cold War was good for us professionally,’’ Emerson said;
‘‘indeed, the Cold War brought us into existence as a field.’’ She also
acknowledged ‘‘the enormous role contemporary politics has always played
in our establishment as a discipline.’’ This may be an unpalatable fact to
some people in the field, but it strikes me as indisputable.

2

Equally indisputable are the dangers of prognostication, as I learned
upon re-reading my article. In the course of rebuking Frances Fukuyama for
proclaiming the ‘‘end of history’’ in 1989, I promptly committed the same sin,
writing with equally unfounded confidence that ‘‘it is clear that we have
reached the end of history as we knew it in the years 1914–1989.’’3 One year
after those words were published, the United States suffered the most
devastating assault on its territory since the War of 1812 and embarked on its
most costly and divisive military campaign since the Vietnam War. I speak of
course of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing Global War on
Terror—a war whose end is not in sight and whose ramifications are as far-
reaching as those of the wars of the twentieth century, including the Cold
War. Moral: never proclaim the end of anything based on current trends,
especially where history is concerned. The same caveat may apply to my
earlier comments about the future of Slavic librarianship. At the end of the
Solanus article, I argued that Slavic studies and Slavic librarianship had
experienced a post-Cold War relapse into normalcy—a ‘‘withering into the
truth’’ was how I showily put it, stealing a line from W. B. Yeats. I also
argued that the profession—Slavic librarianship—was coping rather well

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 171



with the fall from prominence of the field it serves. Was I right about that
then, and if I was, is it still true today?

Judging by the fact that Slavic librarianship continues to survive as a
distinct subspecialty, the profession appears to have successfully navigated
the changes of the past decade. However, since my involvement in the field
these days is limited to lurking on the Slavlibs e-mail forum—whose survival,
by the way, could also be adduced as a sign of the field’s continuing
viability—I must rely on some of my former colleagues for an assessment of
the current state of affairs. And here the picture is mixed. The consensus
among the people I asked appears to be that the profession is in pretty good
shape considering the turmoil of the past fifteen to twenty years—or at least
it’s in no worse shape than other area studies specialties. As one librarian put
it to me in an e-mail, ‘‘Slavic is changing just like everything else and I don’t
think it is that different, other than the pace may be somewhat slower.’’

4

Another former colleague has written of a ‘‘small renaissance’’ in Slavic
librarianship, with several new professionals entering the field in the past
two or three years.5 I have come across other signs of continued vitality, such
as the growing prominence of digital projects in Slavic Studies and Slavic
librarianship, a prominence that has found official embodiment in the Digital
Projects Subcommittee of the American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies (AAASS) Bibliography & Documentation Committee;6 or the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s recent grant program aimed at promoting
collaboration among scholarly publishers, including publishers in the field of
Slavic Studies.7 And I was pleased to see that librarians at the University of
California at Los Angeles and Berkeley remedied a longstanding deficiency
and published a comprehensive guide to Slavic library and archival
collections in the United States and Canada in 2004—the first guide of its
type since 1960.8

But there are also problems. In 2000, I identified the main problems in
day-to-day Slavic librarianship as the erosion of bibliographic control, the
disappearance of established vendors, inadequate acquisitions budgets, and
ineffective exchange programs. Although exchange programs appear to
have lost their saliency—none of the Slavic librarians I contacted for this
piece mentioned them—the other three problems have not. Indeed,
problems with bibliographic control affect librarianship in general, not just
Slavic librarianship. For example, in late 2006 the US Library of Congress
formed the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

9 The
working group issued its final report in January 2008. The report focuses
heavily on changes in information technology and recommends (among
other things) that libraries ‘‘position our technology for the future’’ and
‘‘design for today’s and tomorrow’s user.’’ The consequences of failing to do
so? ‘‘Library users will continue to bypass catalogs in favor of search engines’’
and ‘‘resources needed to catalog at a sophisticated level [will become]

172 A. Trehub



increasingly difficult to sustain.’’10 We are already seeing these trends at
work in our library, and I know that we are not alone.

The other two problems—disappearing vendors and inadequate
budgets—remain as timely as ever. The sudden, unexpected, and disruptive
demise of the Russian Press Service in April 2008 is evidence of the former.
For some Slavic librarians, it revived memories of the turbulent days after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Brad Schaffner, the head of the Slavic
Division at Harvard University’s Widener Library, expressed the hope that
the demise of RPS ‘‘is not the start of another round of collapse similar to the
situation after the fall of the Soviet Union.’’11 Schaffner listed other points of
concern: the weak dollar; prices for foreign publications outstripping already
inadequate budgets; the rising cost of shipping materials (the immediate
cause of RPS’s going out of business); reports of declines in graduate
enrollments in Slavic studies programs; and moves to cut back, disperse, or
dilute major Slavic collections in the United States. Examples of the latter
include proposals to dismantle the renowned Slavic and East European
Library (and other area-studies libraries) at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign; and to turn the Library of Congress’s European Reading
Room into an exhibit space.12

Misguided as they may be, these initiatives point to a much larger issue:
the erosion of confidence in the traditional mission of the humanities and the
value of a liberal-arts education. In a recent article deploring the actual or
impending closures of German departments at a large private and a medium-
sized public university in California, Will Corral and Daphne Patai recalled
the fate of the Slavic languages and literatures department at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was abolished in the 1990s. ‘‘Given the
general lack of commitment to a coherent view of the humanities and their
significance,’’ Corral and Patai wrote, ‘‘it is unavoidable that particular
departments, especially in foreign languages, will be slated for elimination or
revamping according to currently fashionable trends.’’13 If Corral and Patai
are right, then the implications in the long run for Slavic Studies—and Slavic
librarianship—are discouraging.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION LITERACY, AND
DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

But since, as J. M. Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead (or at least
retired), the real issue is what we can do to address the most important
challenge facing Slavic librarianship today. To quote Brad Schaffner again,
‘‘the biggest change to Slavic librarianship’’ in the past decade ‘‘has come as a
result of technical advancements.’’ As befits the head of a library with
extensive collection development responsibilities, Schaffner focused on the
financial aspects of technological change, in particular the difficulty of

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 173



supporting both digital and traditional collections on an analog-era budget.
However, I would suggest that it is just as important to figure out how we as
a profession can best take advantage of new information technologies. This
is where the notion of information literacy comes into play.

The American Library Association defines information literacy as ‘‘the
set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.’’14 More
expansively, information literacy could be defined as the process of teaching
people not only how to access and use new information technology, but also
how to understand the way information is organized, so that they can assess
for themselves its relevance and reliability and integrate it seamlessly into
their work. Readers who were educated in the analog era may be forgiven
for spotting strong similarities between information literacy and the array of
skills and practices described by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff in their
classic The Modern Researcher (1957).

15 However broadly one defines it,
adopting information literacy as a new liberal art at a time when the liberal
arts are being ‘‘kicked off campus’’ may not be a winning strategy for Slavic
librarians, or librarians in general.16 Still, there is general agreement that the
advent of the new information technologies has fundamentally changed
research, writing, and pedagogy. For example, when I took a Slavic
bibliography course at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s, the
syllabus was almost exclusively paper-based (some microfilm was also
involved), and much of it was late-nineteenth-century paper at that. By the
time I left Illinois in 2004, the same course was heavily electronic, with a
strong emphasis on online resources and digital collections. While it is not
yet possible to search a fully indexed Web facsimile version of V. I. Mezhov’s
Russkaia istoricheskaia bibliografiia [Russian historical bibliography], I am
confident that, thanks to mass digitization, it soon will be. At that point the
question will be: Do all students who need to know about Mezhov’s work
actually know that it is available online? Will they even know why they
should consult Mezhov in the first place?

The growing importance of information technology and information
literacy in Slavic librarianship and librarianship in general is the result of
three things: Web browsers, affordable digital publishing tools, and Google.
What we have witnessed in the past fifteen years is nothing less than the
birth and growth of an entirely new communications medium. I would argue
that the Web has already surpassed previous media—radio, cinema, and
television—in its power, immediacy, and influence on our lives. Blogs,
Wikis, social networking sites, and free or inexpensive digital content-
management software have given millions of people the ability to be not
only their own printing presses and publishing houses, but also wire
services, photo agencies, recording studios, movie production companies,
and advertising firms. Google and other search engines enable millions of
other people to find these self-published works. More to the point for our

174 A. Trehub



field, Google has enabled millions of people to bypass libraries completely
in their search for information.

And millions of people are taking advantage of the opportunity.
Numerous studies confirm what reference librarians observe in their daily
work: that students overwhelmingly prefer Google and other commercial
search engines to the specialized information resources libraries offer. For
example, an OCLC survey conducted in 2006 revealed that 89% of the
college students questioned began their information searches with Google
or another search engine.

17 Even more disturbingly for reference librarians,
the same survey revealed that only a small percentage of students—in this
case, 2%—say that they ‘‘consult librarians when seeking help from a trusted
source.’’18 This finding echoes a 2001 study of usage patterns at the Harold
B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.19 For those who believe that
information literacy means knowing which tools to use for a given purpose,
this is not necessarily a bad thing. Google is a powerful tool whose use
should be encouraged, when appropriate.20 After all, the issue is not where
researchers start their search, but where they end it. Still, the very fact that
the library is no longer the preferred starting point for most research projects
has left many members of our profession feeling marginalized. And not
without some justification, since Google searches do not always (or even
often) lead to the library, or to the very expensive proprietary databases that
we spend millions of dollars each year to license.

One point has emerged pretty clearly from the welter of technology-
driven change: the library is no longer perceived as the sole or ultimate
source of authoritative information, or of guidance on how to use it.
However, the library does appear to be the preferred venue for study,
collaboration, social interaction, Internet use, and access to and help with
specialized resources. The job of librarians—including Slavic librarians—is
to build on our comparative advantage in these areas and re-integrate
libraries ‘‘into the information workflow of our students.’’

21 The question, of
course, is how to do that. In my 2000 Solanus piece, I identified the
collaborative production of bibliographies and other online reference
resources as one way to take advantage of the new technologies. As a
former bibliographer, I retain a fondness for the well-crafted MARC record
and respect the purpose of bibliography as an enterprise, which is to
organize created knowledge and present it in a usable way. So I was
dismayed to hear my colleague Tom Wilson, the Associate Dean for Library
Technology at the University of Alabama, proclaim ‘‘the death of
bibliography’’ in his keynote presentation to the 2008 Electronic Resources
and Libraries Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

22 Wilson’s point was that
people want access to the thing itself—for example, the full text of an article,
book, or book chapter—and not a bibliographic surrogate for that thing,
however well-crafted it may be. In this he is surely correct, and thanks to
Google Books, the Open Content Alliance, and other mass-digitization

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 175



projects, the vision he describes is rapidly becoming a reality. But does that
mean that bibliographies (like those of Mezhov) and other traditional
reference tools have entirely outlived their usefulness?

Perhaps. In the Solanus article, I touted the collaboration between the
American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES) and its
European counterpart, EBSEES. This now appears to have been an
infelicitous example. ABSEES is still alive and apparently well: it continues
to be compiled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with help
from contributing editors at other institutions, and is being marketed by
EBSCO Information Services. Unfortunately, EBSEES has not survived the
technological and administrative challenges of the past decade, most
importantly the loss of its long-time editorial headquarters at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. According to the Osteuropa-
Abteilung of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—the bibliography’s current
home—no new records have been or will be added to EBSEES after
December 31, 2007. The bibliography is now a static resource, covering the
years 1991–2007. So the dream of combining the two bibliographies to form
a comprehensive guide to scholarship in our field published ‘‘north of the
Rio Grande and west of the Oder-Neisse Line’’ is defunct.

23 On the plus side,
EBSEES is getting a new search interface, with faceted browsing and tag
clouds.24

But perhaps Wilson’s obituary for traditional reference tools is
premature. Take, for example, Wikipedia. As everyone reading this article
probably knows, Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, communally-edited online
encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales (an Auburn
University alumnus) and Larry Sanger, it currently contains 10 million articles
(2 million in the English-language version) and attracts over 680 million
visitors each year.

25 So it would appear that there is considerable demand for
(some) traditional reference resources, albeit in new guises. This is a demand
that librarians can take advantage of. Some are: Ann Lally and Carolyn
Dunford recently published an article in D-Lib Magazine on using Wikipedia
to direct students to digital collections at the University of Washington
Libraries.

26 We have started doing the same thing at the Auburn University
Libraries, adding links to our digital resources in Alabama-related articles in
the encyclopedia. Slavic librarians might consider following suit, contribut-
ing articles and external links to Wikipedia—or to its peer-reviewed
counterpart, Scholarpedia,

27 or maybe even a discipline-specific encyclope-
dia (Slavipedia?) or Wiki.28 Another way for librarians to integrate Slavic
collections into students’ information workflow is to partner with teaching
faculty in Slavic studies departments and incorporate library resources into
Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, and other Web-based course-management
systems. Helen Sullivan has written about doing precisely that at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

29 Collaborating directly with
teaching faculty to include library holdings in the course syllabus is hardly a

176 A. Trehub



new activity for librarians—it has been going on for decades—but Web-
based course-management systems increase its reach and effectiveness. They
also give librarians the opportunity to incorporate subject-specific guidance
on research skills, strategies, and approaches—i.e., information literacy—
directly into the course syllabus, in a way that can be consulted by students
remotely and at any time. For example, the resource page for a course on
nineteenth-century Russian history would be a good place to link to a
librarian-produced, Web-based video introducing students to Mezhov and
other bibliographic resources. In other words, BI on YouTube. Stranger
things have happened.

Finally, there is digitization and the creation of new digital resources. A
2003 OCLC report on library technology trends predicted that ‘‘digitiza-
tion…may emerge as the most significant new format trend by 2007.’’

30 That
prediction seems well on its way to being fulfilled. Many academic and even
public libraries have embarked on local digitization projects and are adding
digitization to their list of routine activities. Slavic collections are contributing
modestly to this trend. I have already mentioned the Digital Projects
Subcommittee of the AAASS Bibliography & Documentation Committee. The
Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects at the
Slavic and East European Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign currently lists over 170 digital projects at libraries, museums, and
archives around the world.

31 Among many other projects, it includes
Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (a multimedia timeline of the years
between 1917 and 1991) at Michigan State University, the Prokudin-Gorskii
collection of color photographs from pre-revolutionary Russia at the Library
of Congress, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System collection at the
Harvard College Library, and Russia Engages the World at the New York
Public Library.

32

As ex-Slavicist Abby Smith famously asked some years ago, ‘‘Why
digitize?’’33 There are a number of reasons:

N Improving accessibility and visibility. Digitizing the library’s unique
holdings makes them available to the largest possible audience and
encourages their use in teaching, learning, and research.

N ‘‘Branding.’’ Increasingly, many academic libraries offer an identical
selection of commercial databases to their users. Digitization allows
libraries to highlight their unique collections and establish a distinctive
identity.

N Conservation. Digitization reduces the need to handle fragile or light-
sensitive originals.

These are all good reasons for instituting a digitization program, but I would
add another, even more compelling reason: to strengthen the library’s
connection with teaching faculty and especially students by involving them
in projects that combine primary source materials with advanced information

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 177



technology to produce high-quality online resources. In other words,
digitization can be used to position the library as a center for the production
of digital scholarship and an equal partner in the teaching process.

It is interesting and encouraging that the impetus for such an alliance is
coming from scholars, primarily in the humanities. One of the most eloquent
champions of library-based digital scholarship is Ed Ayers, formerly a
professor of history at the University of Virginia and currently the president
of the University of Richmond. In the 1990s, Ayers conceived and supervised
the design of the well-known digital repository, The Valley of the Shadow:
Two Communities in the American Civil War.

34 In the years since then, he
has advocated assigning weight to digital scholarship in promotion and
tenure decisions—a crucial point—and has spoken eloquently and amus-
ingly about the successes and failures of his attempts to fuse scholarship and
teaching with digital technology.35 In our own field, Patricia Hswe has
encouraged Slavic scholars and librarians to get involved in digital
scholarship, highlighting the possibilities for ‘‘collaborative efforts between
faculty, students, librarians, and programmers.’’ She has also touched
indirectly on the BI benefits of digital scholarship, pointing out that today’s
students ‘‘are wired, connected, and geared to go with their gadgets’’ and
calling digital collections ‘‘an incredible resource for librarians who are
looking for up-to-date user services and relevant approaches to user
education.’’

36

Of course, not all students (or librarians, for that matter) are as tech-
savvy as stereotypes would suggest. And, despite its manifest benefits, even
encouraging faculty to get involved in digital scholarship can be difficult. In
my comments on a panel of papers on this subject at the AAASS conference
in Boston in 2004, I identified several obstacles, most of them having to do
not with technology, but with culture. Specifically, with academic culture:
academic politics, rituals, incentive systems, and bureaucratic styles.
Information scientists might call this phenomenon social informatics, while
proponents of Slavic information literacy might include it among the
professional competencies expected of savvy library patrons.37 Whatever it’s
called, an easy familiarity with the academic culture of a specific discipline
(in this case, Slavic studies) is at least as important as a knowledge of
scanning resolutions, file formats, controlled vocabularies, markup lan-
guages, and metadata schemas for the success of such programs. I have
often heard presenters at conferences on institutional repositories say that
the technological challenges of creating a repository are trivial when
compared with the social and cultural ones. In other words, culture trumps
technology. My experience as the director of library technology and as a
manager of digitization projects at Auburn University tends to support that
axiom.

The first problem is prosaic. Senior (read: tenured) faculty members do
not need to work on digital projects. They have cleared the tenure hurdle

178 A. Trehub



and can work on what they choose, at their own pace. They may regard
digital projects with skepticism, or as yet another unlooked-for and
unwelcome intrusion. This is especially likely to be true if they happen to
be older or unfamiliar with information technology, born-digital scholarship,
and new models of scholarly communication. I don’t want to be unfair to
older faculty members who are both interested in and knowledgeable about
the new information technologies. In general, though, getting senior faculty
members interested in digital projects is a tough sell. For their part, junior
(read: untenured) faculty members have other things on their minds. The
main one is getting tenure. Digital projects still do not have a lot of clout
where promotion and tenure are concerned (although this is changing,
slowly, at some institutions). There’s little or no prestige in doing them.
Indeed, depending on the departmental culture, getting too much involved
in digital projects can be detrimental to a junior scholar’s academic career. At
least that is the perception, and it is hard to overcome it when the
professional stakes are so high.

Apart from these prosaic considerations, there are more-substantive
reasons for junior and senior faculty members to balk at investing time and
effort in digital projects. I mentioned skepticism. Faculty members—
especially faculty members in the humanities and social sciences—may
wonder, sometimes justifiably, whether digital projects really contribute to
better learning and research. They may ask where exactly the value lies for
them and their research. As a colleague at one of the aforementioned
conferences on institutional repositories put it, faculty members and other
researchers tend be focused on ‘‘me, me, and me,’’ often for good reason.
They are unlikely to be persuaded by arguments about broader accessibility,
better preservation, application of standards, and opportunities for
collaborative research and instruction. And they may find it difficult to see
exactly how creating and ‘‘publishing’’ high-quality digital resources for
teaching and research purposes—resources that may be based on the
library’s or archives’ materials but that go beyond those materials by
including additional information and scholarly apparatus such as essays or
links to related resources—can help them to address the crisis in scholarly
publishing, a crisis that has been brought about by publishers selling back to
the universities their own intellectual output.

Finally, there are concerns about the pedagogical value of digital
resources per se. When I first started working at Auburn, I gave a pitch about
the Auburn library’s digital projects at a monthly meeting of the Auburn
University History Department. The reception was polite but reserved. This
may have had to do with my deficiencies as a salesman, but it may also have
reflected genuine reservations about what I was selling. As I was
demonstrating a set of digitized historical photographs from one of the
library’s special collections, a tenured but youngish faculty member said that
this was all very nice, but in his view it just reinforced one of the most

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 179



pernicious trends among his students—namely, their reluctance to read
books and other traditional printed materials. The only response I could
offer at the time was to speculate that involving students in the creation of
new digital resources would force them to engage with texts and other
primary-source materials, since these are the raw materials for most digital
projects. Since then, I have seen that digital projects can indeed be used
pedagogically to promote the same level of engagement with primary-
source materials that close reading of traditional texts does. Perhaps just as
importantly, such projects allow faculty to integrate new technology and
digital resources into their own teaching, thereby presenting them with an
ideal opportunity to modify their students’ information-seeking behavior,
instead of complaining about it.

It’s not all bad news and pushback, however. We have found that there
are ways to get teaching faculty interested and involved in digital projects.
Here are some practical suggestions for promoting digital scholarship
through the library:

N Start a lecture series in the library on the new information technologies
and their impact on teaching and learning. For maximum credibility, have
the guest lecturers be faculty members at other universities who have
actually done digital projects and incorporated them into their classes or
research.

N Get support from the institutional office of information technology or the
academic departments to send teaching faculty to EDUCAUSE, the
Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and
other conferences devoted to information technology, libraries, and
higher education in general.

N Work on getting digital projects recognized in the promotion and tenure
system at your institution. If you are a librarian, ask your dean or director
to work with his or her counterparts on campus to put this on the
administration’s agenda. Until digital projects count in the tenure calculus,
it will be an uphill battle to get faculty (especially junior faculty) to spend
time on them.

N If gift resources are available—a big if—and the terms of the gift permit it,
consider diverting money from a gift fund or endowment to create a
modest grant program to support faculty-initiated digital projects in the
library. The Cornell University Libraries have had such a program in place
since 2004. To date, the Faculty Grants for Digital Library Collections
program has supported over twenty digital projects involving faculty from
different departments at Cornell, including an ongoing project based on
the library’s holdings of underground Polish publications from the
Solidarity era.38 The Auburn University Libraries launched a much smaller
pilot version of the Cornell program last year, using interest from a gift
fund. The pilot program’s first project—a digital collection devoted to a

180 A. Trehub



pioneering American female philanthropist of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, based on biographical research conducted by an
Auburn history professor—will be unveiled later this year. A second
digital project—with an East European focus, as it happens—is in the
works and should be ready to be made public in early 2010. The grant
amounts in both cases have been modest: between $3,000 and $5,000 per
project, with most of the money being used to hire student assistants and
fund research trips. The libraries are supporting the projects through staff
time, consultation, and the use of the libraries’ digital production facilities.
The collections are being hosted on library server computers and will be
added to the Auburn University Digital Library.

39

There are other areas in which librarians can make a positive
contribution to digital projects and digital scholarship. One is digital
preservation. Digital preservation is the flipside of creating digital collec-
tions. Although it does not have a direct connection to bibliographic
instruction, information literacy, or research, it is an increasingly important
part of any digitization program. With support from the Institute of Museum
and Library Services (IMLS), Auburn University is currently partnering with
the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery and five
other colleges and universities around the state to create a geographically
distributed digital preservation network using Stanford University’s LOCKSS
(Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) software.

40 The Alabama Digital
Preservation Network (ADPNet) currently contains identical copies of
selected digital collections on server computers at all seven member
institutions.41 More content is on the way, and we hope to recruit more
members to the network in the coming year. There is no reason why the
major Slavic collections in the United States could not join forces and set up a
Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) for the preservation of digital collections in
Slavic Studies.42

CONCLUSION: FROM CURATION TO CREATION

Re-reading one’s past work is educational if not always pleasant, and I
would give my Solanus article an overall grade of B+. In retrospect, I think I
got more things right than wrong, and I am gratified to see that I devoted
almost half the article to the effects of the new information technologies,
including their potential negative effects. On the minus side, I think that I
overestimated the importance of traditional bibliography and grossly
underestimated the importance—or at least the popularity—of Google and
improved search technologies. And my perception of Slavic studies’ viability
as a discipline may have been too sanguine.

It seems to me that there is little that Slavic librarians can do to forestall
the feared decline of area and language studies or the humanities in general.

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 181



What they can do is to participate more fully and be represented more
prominently in the technology-driven trends that are transforming librarian-
ship and indeed other professions as well. Looking back over my twenty
years as a librarian, I would say that the single most important development
in that time has been a shift in emphasis from curation to creation. That is,
from acting as the organizers and stewards of content created by other
people and agencies to becoming content creators in our own right.
Stewardship and preservation of the materials entrusted to us is an
honorable and important job, now perhaps more than ever. But I would
like to see us—and here I rejoin temporarily the ranks of practicing Slavic
librarians—get more involved as a profession in designing and producing
digital scholarship. In this connection, it is perhaps not a bad thing that some
Slavic librarians are leaving their home discipline for broader areas in
librarianship and scholarly communication and are devoting themselves to
promoting information literacy (in its broadest sense) for students and
faculty members. At the beginning of this piece, I referred to my defection
from the field. I now think that was the wrong word. Venturing beyond the
field would have been closer to the mark—and with the possibility of return.
To close with another quotation, this time from one of Osip Mandel’shtam’s
last poems: ‘‘My vernemsia eshche, razumeite!’’ [We’ll be back—count
on it!].43

NOTES

1. Aaron Trehub, ‘‘Slavic Studies and Slavic Librarianship in the United States: A Post-Cold War

Perspective,’’ Solanus, n.s., 14 (2000): 91–108.

2. Caryl Emerson, ‘‘Slavic Studies in a Post-Communist, Post 9/11 World: For and Against Our

Remaining in the Hardcore Humanities,’’ Slavic and East European Journal 46, No. 3 (2002): 449, 451. See

also Victoria E. Bonnell and George Breslauer, ‘‘Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies’’ and Ellen Comisso

and Brad Gutierrez, ‘‘Eastern Europe or Central Europe? Exploring a Distinct Regional Identity,’’ both in

The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton, University of California

Press/University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, Edited vol. 3, (Berkeley,

CA, 2002–2003), http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/3.

3. Trehub, ‘‘Slavic Studies and Slavic Librarianship,’’ 96.

4. Michael Brewer, e-mail to the author, April 10, 2008.

5. Bradley Schaffner, ‘‘Message from the Chair,’’ Association of College and Research Libraries,

Slavic and East European Section, Newsletter 23 (2007): 2–3.

6. Miranda Remnek, ‘‘The AAASS Bibliography and Documentation Committee’s Working Group

on Digital Projects,’’ Slavic & East European Information Resources 6, no. 4 (2005): 81–85.

7. Scott Jaschik, ‘‘New Collaboration for Scholarly Publishing,’’ Inside Higher Ed, December 28,

2007, http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/28/mellon.

8. Allan Urbanic and Beth Feinberg, A Guide to Slavic Collections in the United States and

Canada, special issue, Slavic & East European Information Resources 5, no. 3–4 (2004). This is the first

comprehensive guide to Slavic collections in North America since Melville J. Ruggles and Vaclav

Mostecky, Russian and East European Publications in the Libraries of the United States (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1960).

9. The working group’s charge, composition, and final report can be found at Working Group on

the Future of Bibliographic Control, http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/.

182 A. Trehub



10. Richard Amelung et al., On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the

Future of Bibliographic Control (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2008), 31, http://www.loc.gov/

bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pdf.

11. Bradley Schaffner, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2008.

12. Miranda Beaven Remnek, e-mail to Slavlibs discussion group, February 19, 2008; Jennifer

Howard, ‘‘Scholars Question Library of Congress’s Plan to Relocate a Reading Room,’’ The Chronicle of

Higher Education: Daily News, March 26, 2008, http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2253n.htm.

13. Will H. Corral and Daphne Patai, ‘‘An End to Foreign Languages, an End to the Liberal Arts,’’

Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2008, A30, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i39/39a03001.htm.

14. American Library Association, Association of College and Research Libraries, ‘‘Introduction to

Information Literacy,’’ http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/infolit/overview/intro/index.cfm.

For a skeptical take on information literacy, see Stanley Wilder, ‘‘Information Literacy Makes All the

Wrong Assumptions,’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2005, B13, http://chronicle.com/

weekly/v51/i18/18b01301.htm.

15. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957).

16. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shelley K. Hughes, ‘‘Information Literacy as a Liberal Art: Enlightenment

Proposals for a New Curriculum,’’ Educom Review 31, No. 2 (1996), www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/

reviewarticles/31231.html/; Jack Miles, ‘‘Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:

What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They Are Kicked off Campus?’’ Cross Currents 49, no. 3 (1999):

303–318.

17. Cathy de Rosa et al., College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A

Report to the OCLC Membership (Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, April 2006), 1–7.

18. De Rosa et al., College Students’ Perceptions, 3–11.

19. Patricia A. Frade and Allyson Washburn, ‘‘The University Library: The Center of a University

Education?’’ Portal: Libraries and the Academy 6, no. 3 (2006): 332–333.

20. Google’s effect on reading habits and attention spans is a separate but very interesting question,

unfortunately outside the scope of this paper. See Nicholas Carr, ‘‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’’ Atlantic

Monthly, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google.

21. Ann M. Lally and Carolyn E. Dunford, ‘‘Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections,’’ D-Lib

Magazine 13, no. 5–6 (2007), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html.

22. Thomas C. Wilson, ‘‘E-Resources: Enigma or Dilemma, or Both,’’ (keynote address, Electronic

Resources and Libraries Conference, Atlanta, GA, March 2008), http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/

20656.

23. Trehub, ‘‘Slavic Studies and Slavic Librarianship,’’ 103.

24. European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (EBSEES), http://ebsees.

staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/information.php.

25. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, s.v., ‘‘Wikipedia.’’

26. Lally and Dunford, ‘‘Using Wikipedia.’’

27. Scholarpedia, http://www.scholarpedia.org/.

28. An example is AAASS Bibliography & Documentation Committee, Subcommittee on Digital

Projects, The Digital Slavist, http://digitalslavist.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome.

29. Helen Sullivan, ‘‘Slavic Bibliography Online: WebCT as a Resource for Online Instruction,’’

Slavic & East European Information Resources 3, no. 1 (2002): 21–33.

30. ‘‘Five Year Information Format Trends,’’ OCLC Reports, March 2003, 8.

31. AAASS Bibliography & Documentation Committee, Subcommittee on Digital Projects, Inventory

of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/spx/inventory/.

32. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php; The Empire That

Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/;

The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online, http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/

index.html; Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825, http://russia.nypl.org/home.html.

33. Abby Smith, Why Digitize? Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources,

1999, http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80.html.

34. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, http://valley.vcdh.

virginia.edu/.

35. See, for example, Edward L. Ayers and William G. Thomas, ‘‘Time, Space, and History’’ (paper,

EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Dallas, TX, October 10, 2006), http://connect.educause.edu/Library/

Abstract/TimeSpaceandHistory/38748.

Notes of a Former Slavic Librarian 183



36. Patricia Hswe, ‘‘What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You: A Slavic Scholar’s Perspective on the

Practicality, Practicability, and Practice of Digital Scholarship,’’ Slavic & East European Information

Resources 7, no. 4 (2006): 6–8.

37. See the section devoted Professional Literacy on Michael Brewer’s Web site, Slavic Information

Literacy for Students, Scholars, and Educators, http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/brewerm/sil/

prof/index.html.

38. Cornell University, Faculty Grants for Digital Library Collections, Web site, http://dcaps.library.

cornell.edu/facultygrants/; Solidarność: Cornell University Library’s Collection of Polish Underground

Publications, http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/slav/solidarityhome.html.

39. Auburn University Digital Library, http://diglib.auburn.edu/.

40. LOCKSS Web site, http://www.lockss.org/.

41. Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet), http://adpn.org/.

42. I am informed by the editors that the East Coast Consortium for Slavic Collections (ECCSC) is

spearheading a LOCKSS-based initiative aimed at harvesting and preserving selected Slavic e-journals in

the regular LOCKSS network. The ECCSC is composed of several major academic and public libraries

(Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, New York University,

Princeton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Toronto, and Yale).

43. ‘‘Kak po ulitsam Kieva-Viia…,’’ in Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh

[Collected works in 3 volumes] (Washington, DC: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), 1:270.

184 A. Trehub