Soviet Yiddish Press bibligoraphy explorer

Contents

Introduction

This application allows the general public to explore the bibliographical information about Yiddish Language periodicals published in the Soviet Union and Russian Empire. The project aims to facilitate the future digitization of the Yiddish Press funds stored in Russian and Ukrainian libraries. [↑]

Data

For the current project, we selected only data from the territories controlled by the Soviet Union in 1939. For example, Yiddish periodicals published Vilna/Vilnius at any point of time are not encompassed in this database, but periodicals from Saint Petersburg, Baku or Tashkent at any point in time are.[↑]

The bibliographical information was gathered from catalogues of several libraries: National Library of Russia (St. Petersburg), Russian State Library (Moscow), Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine (Kyiv) and Ukrainian Book Chamber(Kyiv).[↑]

Definitions used in the application

Libraries abbreviations & plot colours:

  • NLR: National Library of Russia, marked blue
  • RSL: Russian State Library, marked red
  • Vern: Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, marked green
  • UBC: Ukrainian Book Chamber, marked yellow

units used in the calculations


  • year volume: (germ. Jahrgang, rus. годовая подшивка), a number of unique titles published in every year in a given period. The amount of single issues is not important, so one year volume may include more than 300 issues, as in case of central party newspaper Der emes with published, or just one issue - as with some single-day factory papers.
    • unique year volume: Quite often the different year volumes of same periodical is held in different libraries. For example, a daily periodical Di Naye Tsayt, published in Kyiv from 1917 till 1919, can be found in three libraries: National Library of Russia, Russian State Library and Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. However, issues from 1919 are found only in Russian State Library, and Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine has only year volume of 1918. Therefore, the total number of year volumes is 6. However, number of unique year volumes is only 3: 1917, 1918 and 1919.
  • unique title: a title of periodical published in a given period. For example, if we take Nevel (a small town in Pskov region of Russia), where a newspaper Stroyka was published between 1932 and 1935, the number of unique titles equals in this location equals 1, but number of year volumes is 4. [↑]

Application usage

The application has two tabs: General View, where you can view information about many periodicals at once and Periodical View, where you only have data about a single title.

In General View tab (right part) mode you can filter the data used for map & plots drawing by the following filters:

  • Time range (using blue slider)
  • Libraries: You can select the data from the particular libraries. De-selecting all checkboxes leads to showing data from all libraries (as if all the checkboxes are selected)
    • show only found materials: Relevant for Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine records. The library records there were partially checked, and some of the materials were not found then due to variety of reasons. This may mean that these periodicals are lost or the record is erroneous.
    • Type of periodical: Select the particular type of periodical for the display and plot drawing.
    Show/hide types of periodicals

    • Magazine: also abbreviated as M
    • Newspaper: also abbreviated as N
    • Journal: scientific periodical
    • Factory newspaper/sheet: periodical pulbished at a factory as a collaboration of a professional journalists from an outside newspaper and activists from the production.
    • vyezdnaya redaktsiya: periodical published by professional journalists visiting minor locations and tackling the local (seasonal) topics
    • Compilation: materials marked in Russian library records as *сборник*
    • 1-day single issue
    • School Compilation

    • Language: You can use a filter to show the periodicals containing only texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, Bukhari (Judeo-Tajik) or Judeo-Tat, or the periodicals which, apart from Yiddish articles, have also texts in other languages.

    You can also use the search form in the table with the data, quickly navigating in the data shown (i.e. jump to a particular city or newspaper), but that doesn't change the map or graphs on the left side.

    The map shows all Locations where any type of periodical was published in the selected time range. The size of the red circle marker is related to the number of unique titles published in this period in a given location - bigger circles represent places with more unique year volumes. If you click on the red marker, you will search for the Location name in the table on the right. To clear the search form quickly, just click on any map area outside markers.

    In order to find a particular location on the map, you can use the locations list below the map: by clicking on one of the options the map will be zoomed on the selected location, or hover with your mouse over a dot - the name of the place will be shown. To clear the search field, just click on any other marker-free area on the map.
    Below the map section different plots are available. These plots are using the data that was selected in the right section of the application. If there is no data to plot, you will see an empty plot: adjust the data selection then. Plot types:

    • Libraries comparison - this line plot shows the number of year volumes of periodicals held in four libraries.
    • Locations comparison - this graph shows the Locations with the biggest number of unique year volumes published in a given period. The filters for the minimum or the maximum number of unique year volumes in a given location. With the filtering option only the huge printing centers or, contrary, locations with little printing can be shown.
    • Year Volumes by year - this graph shows the number of unique year volumes published in the selected years
    • You can plot data from a single location that is zoomed by using the checkbox.
    • Single issues by year - this graph shows the number of single issues published per year. For example, some daily newspapers, such as Moscow “Der Emes” have more than 300 issues in every year volume, whereas factoy single-day newspapers have only one issue in the year volume. This data is currently available only for two libraries: Vern - Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and NLR - National Library of Russia.
      • You can show the single issue from only one location selected in the zoom view by selecting the checkbox.

    In order to jump to the Periodical View, you have to click on one of the periodicals in the table.

    In the Periodical View, you can see the detailed information about the selected periodical: the period it was published, libraries where it is available as well as some further information fetched from the detailed catalogue of the Russian State Library. The table in this section shows all year volumes available for the given periodical in different libraries - quite often libraries have different year volumes of the same periodical. Thus, each row represents single entry from a given library. For each year volume, the table also shows the language of the publication, some comments (usually taken from the original library records) and further information, usually of a technical kind (i.e. circulation numbers) collected during the exploration of the library funds undertaken for this project. Freq column shows the information on the number of issues available for a given year volume in the libraries. [↑]


    Current limitations

    As quite often the titles of the periodicals are not unique (i.e. _Shtern_, which corresponds to several newspapers and magazines published in different places at different times), during the data unification stage I tried to distinguish variou periodicals by different spelling, i.e. using or omitting the article. Moreover, even though usually the Yiddish titles are romanized according to YIVO rules, in some cases these might be violated. Therefore, the provided titles in Latin characters are not 100% accurate.

    However, for some periodicals there are titles in Yiddish, with original unaltered spelling (i.e. with Soviet orthography norms). This data is available in Periodical View tab.

    The data used in this application was carefully checked, however, some data errors are present at this stage of the project. For example, not all periodical entries are merged correctly. The data on the number of issues collected may also have slight inaccuracies.

    Another problem is the correctness of the library catalogues itself. During this project, the survey of the catalogues of Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine was undertaken, and the periodicals (or issues) that are mentioned in the catalogue but were not found in the library storage were noted (but not excluded from the view).[↑]

    Next stages

    As of November 2021, the data presented in the application includes all the data available from two libraries: National Library of Russia and Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, including the data on individual issues available. The data about individual issues available at UBC and RSL is yet to be processed.

    The upcoming functionality of this app includes checking the availability of individual issue of a periodical in a given library, finding the most complete set of issues of a periodical throughout different libraries, as well as identifying lost periodicals and issues.[↑]

    References:

    • Ukrainian Book Chamber databases: http://www.ukrbook.net/fond_arhiv_druk.html#bazy

    • Сахневич Ю. Колекція радянської їдишомовної періодики з фондів Державного архіву друку ДНУ “Книжкова палата України імені І. Федорова” // Бібліотека. Наука. Комунікація: актуальні тенденції у цифрову епоху: матер. Міжнар. наук. конф., 8—10 жовтня 2019 р.: у 2-х т. / НАН України, Нац. б-ка ім. В. І. Вернадського, Асоц. б-к України та ін. — Т. 2. — Київ, 2019. — 396 с. — С. 222—226.[↑]

    All the libraries data used in this application was gathered from publicly accessible sources. [↑]

    Package dependencies & credits

    The project obtained a support through EADH Small Grants Scheme.

    Special thanks to Olena Andronatiy and Evgeniia Meshcheriakova for their kind help throughout the project. [↑]

    Package dependencies:

    ``` shiny dplyr htmltools data.table leaflet ggplot2 stringr shinyWidgets shinyjs shinyalert ``` [↑]

    Help & feedback

    For additional help or to submit feedback or bug reports, please contact: Ilia Uchitel
    University of Jena ilia.uchitel@uni-jena.de