Formulating Searches for Russia-Focused Research

Formulating searches for materials related to Russia presents some specific challenges. Many of these are related to the fact that Russian uses a non-Roman script and, as with all such languages, there are different conventions for rendering Russian names and other words in Roman script. Then there’s the fact of Russian being an intensely inflected language — one with three grammatical genders and associated adjective and verb agreements, and a case system that means that nouns and adjectives morph depending on their role a given syntactic construction.

Using Cyrillic is most often not the best option when searching Western library catalogs and other databases. This is because, for a very long time, Western records for Russian-language resources Romanized Russian-language metadata elements. Over the past ten years or so, dual-script records — records that include both the original script and Romanized text — have become the standard, but not all new records include the original script. There are some efforts being undertaken to use algorithms to generate original-script elements from the Romanized elements in older catalog records, but these efforts are still very much in-progress. The bottom line is that if you search using Cyrillic in Western catalogs and databases, you will be limiting your exploration to materials having dual-script records, which are still very much a minority. Cyrillic searches make sense if you’re looking for a specific, recently published work, but they are not currently the way to go for broader surveys.

It is important not only to Romanize, but to Romanize according to the conventions followed by the people who created the catalog records. Generally, when searching North American catalogs and databases, you will need to follow the American Library Association/Library of Congress Romanization Table for Russian.

Note that the ligatures — the arched lines grouping multiple Roman characters representing a single Cyrillic character — are not something you need to worry about. The same goes for things like the dot above the letter e to distinguish the Russian letter э from the Russian letter е. These are important for the back-end of computer systems, but not for users. And there is no way for users to enter them in search fields anyway.