Revised: 15 January 1999/djp The Bodleian Library contains rich collections of material relating to Russia and Eastern Europe in the fields of history, politics and government, economics, sociology, demography and statistics,, topography, travel and historical geography, bibliography, palaeography, publishing, fine arts, music, philosophy, religion, ethnography and folklore, and general reference.
The Library has already made its pre-1920 catalogue available on CD-ROM, and OCLC has completed the conversion of the vast bulk of the 1.7 million post-1920 catalogue entries -- including the Bodleian bibliographic records for Cyrillic materials which were created between c. 1920 and 1949, the majority of which had been recorded in transliterated form.
However, from 1949-50, the Bodleian changed its cataloguing policy, with the effect that Cyrillic materials were catalogued in the original script, except for the heading, which was still transliterated. This policy continued until the implementation of OLIS in 1988.
The goal of this HEFCE-funded project is to convert all the post-1949/50 Cyrillic records in the Post-1920 guardbooks which have not been transliterated and which have bibliographic descriptions in the vernacular. The exact numbers are not known, since detailed statistics are not available for much of the period. However, it is estimated that the total of records to be converted in-house is approximately 45,000 - 50,000. The majority of the items will be in Russian, but there will also be significant numbers of Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, and Serbian materials.
The first phase of this Cyrillic conversion project concentrates on the Central Bodleian and the Indian Institute Library. Cyrillic items recorded as being in another dependent library (e.g. Rhodes House, Radcliffe Science Library, Law) are excluded from the first phase, and will be converted in phase two, directly from the dependent library card catalogues.
The first tranche of HEFCE recurrent funding for this project was received at the beginning of the academic year 1995-1996. Full conversion began on Monday January 15th 1996, and has been progressing smoothly since that date. Working process has involved the searching of the RLIN and OCLC online databases for a full record match. In the event that a match is not found, the original catalogue entry is keyboarded and encoded as 'keyed'. These keyed records are consequently upgraded to full-level. Phase 1 of the conversion was completed in October 1998 with 33,705 bibliographical records having been converted. A total of 1,968 keyed records have now been upgraded. Phase 2 has now started, and by December a total of 1,457 Law Library Cyrillic records had been converted. The project is scheduled for completion by July 1999.
For further information contact:
Peter Burnett (Head of Catalogues) (2)77015 (ppb@bodley.ox.ac.uk)
Wilma Minty (Head of Catalogue Support Services) (2)77084 (wlfm@bodley.ox.ac.uk)
Helen Hardman (Project Supervisor) (2)77117 (hrh@bodley.ox.ac.uk)
Revised: 15 January 1999/djp