Building Balkan Studies: Multidisciplinary Resources  Tags: slavic  

This is a list of links to the catalogs of the National Libraries of the region.  The notable exception is the Romanian National Library.  Their catalog can be very helpful but has not been accessible for some time.  To check on its status you can go to the library's home page at http://www.bibnat.ro/ and click on the catalog link in the left-hand side bar.  If unavailable, the union catalog may be helpful!

The library catalogs of the region are extremely varied.  Most offer the search indexes that scholars have come to expect.  All are multi-disciplinary by definition and tend to be highly inter-regional at least historically.  Each will have its own particular character.  Many will offer searches of articles, monographs and dissertations along with all sorts of media searches.  The Albanian National Library has an excellent catalog of periodical literature online in addition to its catalog of books and scanned card catalog of older material.

The Bulgarian National Library has separate interfaces for the various databases it offers.  There is an interface for the complete holdings of the library from 1984-2007, another for articles and a third for periodicals.  The article database includes citations from 1992-.

The Croatian National Library catalog uses a different system for its catalog.   The National Library website has many very useful sources as do the other national library sites for the region.  This one includes access to the natonal bibliography.

This catalog allows for a large number of easily accessible search indexes.  It is also possible to specify the type of material as can be see from the options box on the left hand side of the screen.  The library website also provides access to the scanned card catalog of publications in the collection issued up to 1974 and an additonal scanned catalog of publications issued between 1974 and 1990.

Moldova's library catalog is also available electronically and has some interesting features.  The highlighted area in the image below show one such capability.  By marking one of the boxes the researcher can search several collections at once.  The search that is shown below was included to give some idea of the breadth of the catalog which includes much older material than many online library catalogs.

The Romanian National Library catalog does include articles and books but is somewhat unpredictable in its availability.  The Union Catalog of Romanian library holdings offers a useful alternative when the former is not accessible.

"COBISS.Net is the name of the network that connects autonomous (national) COBISS library information systems of different countries and their current research information systems. From a technical perspective, COBISS software enables users to download records from any of the COBIB shared bibliographic databases, the OCLC catalogue (WorldCat) and other databases. The Agreement on the establishment of the COBISS.Net network and the free exchange of bibliographic records, created in autonomous library information systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia, was signed in Belgrade in February 2003. In November 2006, the aforementioned Agreement was also signed by the Bulgarian National Library."