Albanian | Bulgarian | Czech and SlovakHungarian |Macedonian | Polish | Romanian | Russian/Soviet | Slovene, Serbian, and Croatian

Collection Overview
Integrated into the Research Collections of Indiana University's Herman B Wells Library, the general Slavic collection is between 520,000 and 550,000 volumes. Approximately 95% of these are in the humanities and the social sciences. The university started to build the collection in the 1940's. This was early enough for librarians to purchase large Slavic collections from major book dealers, such as Perlstein, for modest sums of money. In this way, the library was able to acquire 19th century materials, and complete runs of academy and other institute publications with some ease.

It should be noted that these figures do not include government publications, thus omitting such works as the FBIS reports and governmental research reports concerning the areas of Europe and Asia.

If a foot of shelving holds roughly 14 volumes, then the Slavic Collection consists of slightly over 7 miles of shelving.

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The Albanian Collection
The Albanian collection totals just over 1,000 volumes, about 700 of which are in Albanian, and the rest in Western languages and Russian. There are long runs of the major history and philology journals (Studime Filologjike, 1964-1990; Jeta e Re, 1949-1972; Studime Historike, 1964-1991). It is the smallest of the collections, although it stands up well against the Albanian collections of other schools, with over 500 volumes in language and literature and almost 300 volumes in Albanian history.  With the demise of exchanges with Albania in 1992, we received only a few Albanian materials from Kosovo during the 1990s.  Now we are regularly purchasing materials directly from Tirana and receiving Albanian materials through the Macedonian exchange program.

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The Bulgarian Collection
The library has maintained a blanket order system for Bulgarian materials with the Bulgarian National Library for the past 25 years, with a hiatus from 1995-2000. They have done a superb job in building our collection. They have sent us complete runs of all of the major authors--with no missing volumes, the major publications in history, and reference books. Now, we depend more on the direct purchase of new monographs. This is a research collection which is underused. The collection of Academy publications goes back to the 1890's. There are about 19,200 volumes, 16,200 of which are in Bulgarian.

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The Czech and Slovak Collections
The Czech collection supports area study research at a post-graduate level. The Slovak collection, however, is weaker and supports research in language, literature, and history only. The Czech collection contains long runs of journals (Nase Rec, 1917-1996; Slovo a Slovesnost, 1935-1996; Lumír, 1851-1940). Sadly, the library missed many of the publications during the exciting 1967 and 1968 period. The purchase of the microfiche "Prague Spring '68: Dailies and Periodicals Covering All Spheres of Social Life" has filled in much of this gap. For the past 15 years Indiana has had a major exchange with the National Library, (now, mainly for serials) which has functioned with great efficiency. The combined Czech and Slovak collections have 45,000 volumes (36,000 in Czech) of which 40,300 are in the vernacular languages. While there are a few émigré Slovak materials, considerable efforts have been made to collect post 1968 Czech émigré books and journals.

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The Hungarian Collection
Although there are major gaps in the Hungarian collection, it is still one of the best in the United States. During the years when professor Ranki was at Indiana, only the Library of Congress and Harvard could match Indiana's then current collecting. The post 1989 holdings are weak, due to the enormous difficulty of receiving books from Hungary. The total collection contains approximately 24,300 volumes, 20,400 of which are in Hungarian. 

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The Macedonian Collection
The Macedonian collection is one of the smaller vernacular collections, currently containing about 1,800 titles, of which about 60 are serial titles. It focuses on history, language, literature, and linguistics, which account for about 75% of the total titles. Other disciplines of relative strength within the Macedonian collection include anthropology, business, economics, philosophy, religion, and political science. This vernacular collection is supported by about 100 English titles on Macedonian history and literature, and furthermore by the much more substantial Western-language collection devoted to the Balkan peninsula in general. The collection is maintained and developed through direct purchase of new titles (from the German vendor Kubon & Sagner) and foreign exchange with the National and University Library "St. Kliment Ohridski" in Skopje.

Not to be overlooked are the three serial titles available in full-text in the online database "Central and Eastern European Online Library" http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/publicationlist.aspx:

Balkananalysis.com
Blesok -literatura i drigi umetnosti
Identiteti: spisanie za politika, rod i kultura

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The Polish Collection
The Polish collection at Indiana is massive, second only to the Russian/Soviet holdings. It contains 59,100 volumes, 52,800 in Polish. It supports graduate research in most areas of the humanities and social sciences. It has the only holding of Czas (1848-1900 on 50 reels of microfilm) in the U.S. The émigré publications are well represented, and it has substantial holdings of Polish literature in English translation. Since 2002 the library has been adding annually approximately 1,000 Polish language books.

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The Romanian Collection
The Romanian collection is very uneven. The collection has depended mainly on exchange programs, which flood the library with books one year and send nothing the next. The count for materials concerning Romanian studies is 17,000 volumes, 15,860 of which are in Romanian. Renewed efforts are being made to increase our receipt of current Romanian materials. Starting in 2003 we have been receiving close to 1,000 new volumes annually.

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The Russian/Soviet Collection
This collection is very strong in 20th century history and literature. For 20 years the library maintained a standing order for the first edition of every Soviet author published in Russian, and all literary authors' collected works. There are strong holdings, especially in microfilm for publications during the 1916-1918 period. The 19th century collection, especially in history, is definitely weaker. The library has complete runs of most of the 20th century journals from Europe and the United States concerning Russian language, literature, and history. This includes all publications of Mouton reprints. When a search was made of Horecky's Basic Russian Publications, the collection proved to be strong in Reference, History, Diplomacy, Philology, and General Culture. The weakest areas were in Family, Health Services, Insurance, and Labor.

The Estonian collection appears to be unmatched by any other American library.

One of the very strong parts of the Soviet collection is for studies of Soviet Central Asia, now Eurasia. This includes large collections in the Turkic languages of Central Asia. There is also a special collection for the study of Georgia and the general Caucasus.

The overall figure for the Ukrainian collection is unknown, since it has been traditionally counted with the other Soviet materials. However, it has been determined that there are 8,850 volumes in Ukrainian literature and 5,510 in history, for a total of 14,360 in those areas. In all I.U. has 16,800 volumes in Ukrainian.
 
The total Russian/Soviet collection is approximately 247,000 volumes, 194,000 of which are in Russian.

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The Slovene, Serbian, and Croatian Collections

The collection for "Former Yugoslavia" studies stands at 40,300 volumes, about 5,000 of which are in Western languages or in Russian. The University was a depository for the Yugoslav PL-480 Program, collecting all materials published in Yugoslavia for those years. During the past seven years, special efforts have been made to make the Slovene collection a research collection for the Midwest libraries. For this reason, the library has the newspaper Delo and subscriptions to some 40 other Slovene journals. The Slovene collection currently has approximately 6,000 volumes.

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Last Updated:  16 November 2010