The LC Exchange is a program to distribute unwanted duplicate copies in LC’s possession to other research libraries. These are duplicates of monographic imprints from and/or about our region of focus (Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union). Duplicates are shipped to the first library in the sequence (Princeton), and that library ships unaccessioned books to the next library in the sequence. Composition and distribution of lists for selection has proven prohibitive from a labor cost standpoint, and so the full volume of duplicates is shipped directly from library to library. Currently, LC duplicates are shipped to Princeton, where books are selected for Princeton University Library and the other ReCAP partner libraries (Columbia, Harvard, and New York Public Library). There are currently no other libraries participating in the program, and LC duplicates not accessioned by Princeton are not retained. The program would welcome additional participants, including participants outside the East Coast Consortium. For more information please contact Thomas Keenan: tkeenan@princeton.edu

  • Coordinated, Distributed Collecting of Mass Market Publications

The Russian book publishing sphere has seen an enormous swell in recent years of mass marketed and mass distributed pseudo-scholarly monographs on a variety of historical and social-scientific topics. Known in Russia as историческая публицистика, научно-популярные издания, научно-публицистические издания, as a rule these are grossly tendentious, popularized, sensationalized, and under-documented publications on Russian and Soviet history, contemporary Russian and global politics, the social and cultural realities of contemporary Russia and the wider world. They are often recognizable by sensationalized titles and cover art, and are almost invariably books of several hundred pages with very brief bibliographies and few or no citations within the body of the text. In those cases where there does appear to be more serious scholarly apparatus (more extensive bibliographies and extensive intra-textual citation), more often than not closer inspection reveals serious problems with the work’s source base. 

While these publications fall short of the standard for academic literature, they do have research value as primary source material for contemporary social scientists and future historians. As the tide of this material continues to rise, however, it has become necessary for those in charge of maintaining collections of the Russian research-valuable publishing output in history and the social sciences to develop deliberate strategies for this category of acquisition. Recognizing both the need to capture and preserve this material, and the fact that the volume is such that it threatens to overwhelm budgetary resources and shelf space allocated for Russian history and social science publications and to marginalize bona fide scholarly imprints in these categories from Russian publishers in our collections, the ECC has undertaken to distribute the acquisition of this material across multiple member institutions. The Consortium has identified 11 publishers who produce and distribute the bulk of this material and assigned publishers to individual member libraries. The participating ECC member libraries have excluded this category of the output of publishers not assigned to them in their relevant approval plan profiles.

The ECC libraries currently participating in this arrangement are: Columbia, Cornell, Duke, New York Public Library, Princeton, and the University of North Carolina.

  • Capturing and Preserving “Extremist Literature”

The ECC members are organizing an effort to ensure the capture and preservation of monographic publications that have been included in the Russian Federation Justice Department’s List of extremist materials and the Ukrainian State Television and Radio Broadcast Commission’s “List of book publications, the content of which is aimed at ending Ukrainian independence; inciting violence, or inflaming ethnic, racial, or religious hostilities; or violating human rights and freedoms.” The Consortium is dividing the publications on these lists into categories, determining which publications on these lists are and are not represented in North American research collections, and are making attempts to acquire unrepresented titles as well as taking measures to ensure future publications in these categories will be captured through approval plans and other standing acquisitions arrangements. The Consortium is also endeavoring to add notes to the catalog records for these titles, notes that identify them as being included in those lists. Once this has been completed, researchers should be able to generate comprehensive returns for holdings of books on these lists across the ECC member libraries by searching for the specific language of these notes in OCLC.

  • Web Archiving Efforts

ECC members have coordinated 2 web archiving projects, working with the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s web archiving program. The first, broadly titled “Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive,” has been established as a sort of catch-all for the preservation of a wide variety of potentially research-valuable web content being produced in the region. The second is the “Literary Authors from Europe and Eurasia Web Archive,” whose purview is “web content related to literary authors (of both fiction and non-fiction essays), translators, critics and publishers from Europe and Eurasia with the aim of preserving the history of the contemporary literary process as reflected in the non-print publishing activity of important literary figures and organizations.”

  • Research-Guide Coordination

The Consortium is putting together a plan for inter-institutional coordination of research guides. The objective is to reduce duplication of effort and mobilize the deep stores of specialized knowledge distributed across the professional community of North American area specialists focused on the region (Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union). The hoped-for product of this coordination is a rich unified info-sphere for researchers interested in the region, an info-sphere maintained jointly by specialist librarians in North America, and possibly beyond. More details on this project should be forthcoming in 2020.