Building Balkan Studies: Multidisciplinary Resources  Tags: slavic  

Union catalogs, catalogs that list the holdings of many libraries, can offer the researcher not only a broader collection of materials but also locational options. 

There are a wealth of interdisciplinary resources in the social sciences and humanities that include vernacular language materials. Many of these are subscription databases, rich in content, often including full-text of current publications. There are also a large number of underused resources, particularly the national bibliographic, national library and archival resources that can help create an expansive base of materials on a topic.

Most scholars are familiar with the databases and bibliographies relevant for their discipline. However, if you are beginning a multidisciplinary approach to a topic you will probably need to look at an array of more generalized resources. These will include everything from the national library catalogs to broad based scholarly resources like Web of Science and Scopus. A very good guide to a number of the resources available here can be reviewed in the Multilingual Electronic Resources guide.

This guide will focus on a range of different types of multidisciplinary resources. It will include the following categories:

• Archival resouces
  • This will be largely a guide to the archival gateways of the region and their resources.
• National Library Catalogs
  • Library access for the region and the use of the national library catalogs as subject bibliographies will be the focus of the discussion
• Vendor Systems of Interdisciplinary Databases
  • The trend in databases has been to move to the multidisciplinary. The method has been to create the single interface with access to many databases. This type of resource will be covered in this section.
• Individual Interdisciplinary Databases

In all cases the discussions here will be limited to online resources, propietary and available via the open web. Print sources are discussed at length in our online guide. Anyone interested in further information on such resources should consult the staff of the Slavic Reference Service.

One final note that should be included here. The most effective use of many of the resources here includes the use of RSS feeds, blogs, scanners, bibliographic software, etc.. There will be examples of some of these methods in this guide but no in depth discussion. For further information please see Research Technologies at the UIUC Library .

Many libraries are accessible via interfaces or cataloging systems such as The European Library or WorldCat.  Some of these are especially user-friendly.  So for example in the European Library search interface, you can search for an author whose name appears in a catalog in cyrillic, but use latin characters and still get hits.  This catalog has many very useful features.