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Russian Visual Culture

Scholarship/ Secondary Literature

Scholarship and other secondary literature on Russian visual cultre is discoverable and accessible via a number of different channels.

Monographic Literature

Princeton University Library
For Western monographic scholarship Princeton’s own Library Catalog is the best place to go for immediate access to specific titles. It is also a good place to explore the scholarship relevant to a specific research interest, indexing as it does not only Princeton’s voluminous collections, but the shared collection of the ReCAP Partnership (Columbia, Harvard, New York Public Library, and Princeton).
 

 

WorldCat
WorldCat is the best available venue for broad and deep exploratory searching. WorldCat is a database that amalgamates the catalog records from more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries. The database contains over 2 billion records representing materials in 470 languages and dialects. Students and scholars of Russian literature should note that the Russian State Library in Moscow (the “Leninka”) and the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg do not contribute catalog records to WorldCat and must be searched separately.
 

 

The National Library of Russia «Публичка»
The website of the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg provides access to the Library’s online catalog and several other databases. This catalog is particularly useful for confirming the existence of items not represented in WorldCat, and for confirming the bibligoraphic details of such items. In the current geopolitical climate, items in the «Публичка» collections will be available only to researchers able to travel to Russia.
 

 

The Russian State Library («Ленинка»)
The collections of the Russian State Library in Moscow are somewhat larger than those of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Its catalog, however, is less user friendly than that of the «Публичка». It is, though, a good venue for confirming the existence of items not represented in WorldCat, and for confirming the bibligoraphic details of such items. As with the «Публичка», in the current geopolitical climate, items in the collections of the «Ленинка» will be available only to researchers able to travel to Russia.
 

Scholarship in Periodicals

ProQuest Central
A large suite of databases that can be searched federally in one interface. Included are databases indexing scholarship on visual culture, among them Art & Architecture Archive‎ (1860 - 2015) and ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM)‎ (1974 - current).
 

 

EBSCO Academic Search Ultmate
A large suite of databases that can be searched federally in one interface. Included are databases indexing scholarship on visual culture, among them Art & Architecture Source.
 

Romanization

A Note about Transliteration. Princeton University Library Catalog, WorldCat, and most if not all other North American catalogs use the Library of Congress Romanization Table for Russian as the standard for transliterated Russian. When searching these catalogs it is recommended that Russian names and other words be transliterated using this scheme. Searching in Cyrillic will retrieve only a small subset of Russian materials in these collections. When searching the online catalogs of libraries in the Russian Federation, using Cyrillic is generally most effective.