Welcome to the Introduction to Slavic Information Resources, created and maintained by the University of Illinois’ Slavic Reference Service This guide was made possible by the generous support of the U.S. Department of State Title VIII program. It is intended to assist scholars working on Slavic, East European and Eurasian topics. We believe that it can be of use to junior scholars who are at the beginning stages of their research, and who are in need of an overview of the major bibliographic sources in their field. In the case of advanced researchers, the guide can serve as a checklist of sorts, allowing them to verify whether they had consulted all the main bibliographic materials on a particular topic.
This list of sources cannot by any means be viewed as comprehensive. The focus on these pages is on the use of guides and research strategies. Where particular sources are of special significance they will be described in detail. Our patrons may or may not necessarily agree with the sources we have identified as “significant.” The selection of sources has been based on experience gathered over years of answering reference questions by the Slavic Reference Service.
This is an evolving work and some sections are better developed than others. As time and resources allow, we will continue to improve on it and fill in the gaps in coverage. Most of the call numbers you see listed at the end of the bibliographic entries are for the Library of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the case of sections created by the Jagiellonian Library, Kraków, the call numbers refer to their shelf list.
Should you have any suggestions for reference materials to be added to the guides, please contact the Slavic Reference Service at srscite@library.illinois.edu or via other means. If you should have any questions, would like elaboration on any of the areas sketched out in the following pages, or need additional assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at 333-1349 or via the e-mail listed above.
The staff of the Slavic Reference Service have all contributed to this effort. We extend our special gratitude to Ms. Barbara Bułat of the Jagiellonian University Library, Krakόw, for her significant contributions to the Polish section. For more information on research strategies and General Resources related to the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian collections, please visit our General Sources and Strategies for East European Research page.
