TIPS for using NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARY CATALOGS withRUSSIAN

1) You will find Cyrillic in many North American library catalogs and in WorldCat, but search them in transliteration, not in Cyrillic. Our libraries began including Cyrillic in records only recently and not in all of them. If there is no Cyrillic in the record, a Cyrillic search will not find it.[1]

2) With the exceptions noted in 4) below, North American library catalogs, including Stanford’sSearchWorks, use the Library of Congress (LC, a.k.a. ALA-LC) transliteration system for languages not written in the Roman alphabet. This means that if you have a citation transliterated using a different system, you will need to re-transliterate it, or you probably won't find what you're looking for. Works by V.V. Yanov, for example, will be under IAnov. LC transliteration tables can be found here: There is also a linkonStanford’s Slavic & East European main page: (scroll down to the bottom). Tables for non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic can be found here, too. Do not neglect to look at the tables, because you will find some surprises.

3) Do not put transliterations of miagkie and tverdye znaki (' and '') into SearchWorks or WorldCat. Leave them out, unless you copied and pasted the word from SearchWorks. Ignore diacritics on Roman letters (hačeks, etc.).

4) Exceptions to the transliteration rules can occur under a few circumstances:

• Names of people who are well-known in North America and generally appear in English-language sources under some other spelling. A partial list of these:

Bely, AndreyDostoyevsky, Fyodor

Mayakovsky, VladimirTolstoy, Leo

Yevtushenko, YevgenyDjilas, Milovan

Trotsky, LeonStalin, Joseph

Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich Mirsky, D. S.

• Scholars who write in both English and Russian (or Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Georgian, etc.) and use a different system to transliterate their own names on English works. For example,

Lewytzkyj, BorisPospielovsky, Dimitry
Tschiževskij, Dmitrij

• Non-Russians who write in both their own languages and Russian, or are well-known in Russia. There may be entries under LC transliteration from each language.Try both forms. For example, there are entries under both Dumbaże, Nodar and Dumbadze, Nodar for this Georgian writer.

If you find less than you think you should in SearchWorks, use Socrates (Old Catalog) to do a Browse search using LC transliteration (a Simple Search with just the author’s last name and first initial, for example, then click “browse”). You should find at least a cross reference to the “authorized” form, used in SearchWorks. If you still find little or nothing for a well-known person, try playing with the transliteration. You may sometimes not find all works by an author under the same form of his or her name.

4) Do not type in too much information. A personal name may be entered in library catalogswith his or her surname plus first name, surname plus initials, or (occasionally) only the surname. There could be a mistake in your citation or in the catalog record. In short, typing in too much multiplies your chances of missing what you are looking for. If necessary, try a Socrates Browse search as in the previous paragraph.

6) If searching for a title that contains a person's initials, be very careful. Even though your citation may contain initials, the person's given name may be written out on the title page of the book (and thus in the library catalog record). And there may or may not be a space between the initials. If possible, search the title without the initials. For example,

Citation: Учение В.И. Вернадского о биосфере и ноосфере

Search as:uchenie vernadskogo o biosfere or some variation of that.

You could also search some other field, e.g., the author.

7) Russian-language material published in 1918 and before is almost certainly written in old orthography. LC transliteration of obsolete letters and spellings is different from their modern orthography equivalents. Your citation is probably in modern orthography.

8) Pay attention to locations. In SearchWorksclick on the title to see which issues of a journal are available and where they are. Current issues could be in Green’s Current Periodicals, recent bound issues in Greenstacks, and older issues in SAL3, for example. Recent issues could be at the bindery rather than lost. Books can be in Green, Hoover, one of the SALs, a branch library, one of the reference collections within Green, etc. If a call number ends in F or FF, it may be shelved nearby on the bottom shelf or in a folio case.

9) Holdings of serials (journals, magazines, newspapers) are sometimes inaccurate in our catalog. Don’t give up in despair without looking in the stacks, paging the issue you want from SAL, and/or asking at the Information Desk. If SearchWorks says a title is shelved in Hoover, ask at the Reference Desk there. SearchWorks may show more holdings than we have, as well as less. Allow extra time when looking for serials.

[1]You will indeed find some records in WorldCat that are only in Cyrillic or that are in some non-LC transliteration scheme. These are from libraries outside the English-speaking world. They will not be useful here for interlibrary loan purposes, since Stanford has interlibrary loan agreements only with libraries in the U.S. and Canada.