Slavic Archives  Tags: archives literature slavic russian  

Types of Resources

There are all kinds of archival guides, digital and print.  Guides to archival materials are also found in reference sources.The vast majority are descriptions of the major "fondy" in the archives.  Most will have indexes of proper names and some will have topical indexes.  So suppose you are looking for information on medicinal herbs.  Where do you start?  The easiest starting point is what is referred to as an interarchival guide.  There are a number of these but one of the best is Patricia Grimsted Archives of Russia.  Why this one?  It has a very fine subject index and includes an extensive list of archival holdings in museums. 

Bibliographic Sources

These are primarily bibliographic guides or bibliographies of bibliography.  They are useful for many things not least of which is orienting yourself to the archives in your field.  One of the many excellent features about Grimsted Arkhivy Rossii is that it has a very fine subject index and includes an extensive list of archival holdings in museums.  One additional feature is it list of bibliographies on the archives and their holdings which can be as valuable as the guides. 

To return to the example of medicinal herbs, Grimsted has an entry for the following item:

Utkin, L. A.; Gammerman, A. F. and Nevskii, B. A. Bibliografiia po lekarstvennym rasteniiam: Ukazatel' otechestvennoi literatury: rukopisi XVII-XIX vv., pehatnye izdaniia 1732-1954 gg. Moscow/Leningad: Izd:vo AN SSSR 1957. 725 pp. 

Grimsted's annotation indicates that this bibliography includes a catalog of manuscripts relating to medicinal herbs in Russia.  It would be a very good starting point for a search.

Example:  The guide you see below is a general guide to regional bibliographies but can be very useful for keeping up to date with new sources on the archives for a particular area.

Interarchival Guides

These are guides to numerous archives in one place.  The online guides provided by UNESCO and the University of Idaho are two of the more famous digital guides to the archives of the world.  For most of the countries of the Slavic region the national ministry responsible for archives has a website that also serves this function.Some list archives of a particular type, many are geographic listings of archives.  Most tend to give general information about an archival institution, not so much about the contents of a specific archive.   For Russia there is a very good portal called Arkhivy Rossii.  It can be viewed at

Example:

Archival Guides:

 Example:

Encyclopedic sources:

There are many encyclopedic sources that include archival information and they can save you a great deal of time.  One of their primary uses is for locating personal archives.  The example below is taken from the publication Russkie Pisateli 1800-1917.  Each entry in this source has an extensive lising of archival information.  There are sources that supply locations of archival holdings for political organizations.  A very good example would be Politicheskie partii Rossii. Konets XIX - pervaia tret XX veka.

   Example: