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

The acronym "FIAF" is derived from "Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film," a.k.a. The International Federation of Film Archives, based in Brussels, which maintains this database.

Number of citations to materials in Slavic & East European languages in FIAF as of 4 June 2008:

• Polish:  7,428
• Russian:  6,892
  
• Czech:  6,155
  
• Bulgarian:  2,746
• Hungarian:  2,143
• Romanian:  1,831
• Slovenian:  1,114
  

• FIAF "includes complete data from all volumes (1972 to the present) of the International Index to Film Periodicals, plus records from its TV-related companion (1979 to [2000?])."
• "FIAF Index to Film Periodicals is a bibliographical index offering in-depth coverage of the world's foremost academic and popular film journals from 1972 to the present day."
• "The Index to Film Periodicals allows detailed searching of a third of a million records contained in the database. Each entry consists of a full bibliographic description, an abstract and comprehensive headings (biographical names, film titles and general subjects). It is also the only database offering film periodical indexing using a hierarchically ordered controlled thesaurus with more than 20,000 subject terms. The index contains comprehensive television periodical indexing until 2000 and TV related articles from film periodicals continue to be indexed."
• 300+ journals indexed
• Thesaurus of 20,000 hierarchically-organized subject terms
• Includes a "General Index"

While the absolute numbers of articles on film and TV in Eastern Europe and the CIS are rather small, compared to the overall size of the database they are not insignificant. Citations to articles in Slavic & East European languages alone comprise over 8% of the database. FIAF also offers the advantages (and disadvantages) of searching a film- and TV-only database. Click (and then click again) on the image at right to see the six results of a search for articles in Czech with the subject heading "Transition from silent period to sound."

FIAF, like IBZ, uses a transliteration system for Cyrillic alphabets that is similar to the one often used in continental Europe (i.e., "сценарист" becomes "scenarist," "Островский" becomes "Ostrovskij," "я" becomes "ja"). However, there are some exceptions (i.e., "Жан д'Арк" is represented as "ZHan d'Ark," not "Zan d'Ark.").