Multilingual Electronic Resources for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies  Tags: slavic east_european research_methods russian technology  

"IBZ" stands for "Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur aus allen Gebieten des Wissens," i.e. "International bibliography of periodical literature covering all fields of knowledge."  IBZ is also known as "The Dietrich."

For languages written in the Cyrillic script, IBZ uses the German DIN system (which appears in a table here), but without any diacritical marks.  For example, "ц" and "ч" are both rendered as "c", and "з" and "ж" both become "z".  "Х" is transliterated as "ch."

Although IBZ's name suggests that all academic fields are covered, in practice it functions as "an international and interdisciplinary bibliography of academic periodical literature mainly from the Humanities, Social sciences, and Arts."

"IBZ online contains over 2,956,240 journal articles from about 11,381 journals covering the years 1983" to the present.

For materials indexed by IBZ and its predecessors prior to 1983, researchers should consult the University of Illinois' print copy, held in the Main Reference Room's east encyclopedia case (and on a nearby index table) under the call numbers 053 BD, 053 BD sup., 053 BDB, and 050 In8. These hundreds of volumes cover the years between 1896 and 1982.

IBZ is updated monthly (approximately 10,000 entries per month).

Most articles are assigned broad German subject headings, which are also translated into English. This can make it difficult to predict which spelling/transliteration of a search term will be most effective. For example, a search for "moldova" as subject, author, or title word yields 197 results; for "moldau," 163 results; for "moldawien," 143; for "moldavia," 69. On the other hand, a search for "kazakhstan" as a subject, author or title word yields 316 results; for "kasachstan," 311; but the same search for "kazachstan" yields only 8 results. These, however, illustrate nicely the kind of coverage of continental European publications that IBZ provides. Click (and then click again) on the image above to view these 8 results.