Full-text Materials from the André Savine Collection on the Internet Archive Site

The Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have begun digitizing the André Savine Collection. Complete texts of the digitized materials are on the Internet Archive site www.archive.org and are thus available to all users for free. Before digitization, the materials must be cataloged and the resultant catalog records incorporated into the Libraries' Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). If the materials meet the condition requirements established by the Internet Archive and are not subject to copyright restrictions, they are digitized after cataloging.

Searching in the Internet Archive

1. Specifics of searching Russian-language materials in the Internet Archive

• Transliteration
• Old and new orthography

2. Searching the Internet Archive

3. Searching by thematic categories

Transliteration

All bibliographic information (the title of the book or periodical, authors’ names, publisher, etc.) is in Russian, but is written in the Latin alphabet—that is, transliterated. Transliteration is done according to the Library of Congress transliteration table, which can be found on the web at: http://www.indiana.edu/~libslav/slavcatman/trrus.html. It is helpful to print out this table and keep it by your computer while searching the Internet Archive or the electronic catalogs of our libraries and those of other American libraries (more on this below). When doing searches according to this table, you should ignore all the signs (or “diacritics”) above the letters. For example, the Russian letter Ц is represented in the table by the two Latin letters ts with an arc connecting them: you should ignore the arc and type simply ts. The texts of the digitized materials themselves are in Russian (Cyrillic).

Old and new orthography

An important peculiarity of searching is linked to the differences between old and new orthography. In the title "Послѣдніе дни Крыма: впечатлѣнія, факты и документы" the words "последние" and "впечатления" are written with the older character (ѣ) called ять. The transliterations of the modern spellings of these words are, respectively, 'poslednie' and 'vpechatleniia' (with the Russian letter е transliterated as the Latin e). However, cataloging rules require the letter ѣ to be transliterated as "ie", so this old-orthography title is correctly transliterated as "Posliednie dni Kryma: vpechatlieniia, fakty i dokumenty." Thus, if you used contemporary orthography to transliterate this title for searching in the Internet Archive, you would not find the title. (Catalog records in the UNC Libraries' OPAC for Savine Collection materials, however, contain "added titles" in modern orthography, so that the material can still be found, even when the title on the title page itself is printed in the old orthography.)

To find all the André Savine Collection materials that have been digitized in the Internet Archive as of the current time:

Type the following in the Search box: Savine Collection
Leave the value All Media Types as is in the adjoining box
Click on the red GO button (see Illustration 1)

Illustration 1.

The results of the search will appear on-screen, with this heading:

«Search Results
Results: 1 through 50 of 226 (0.041 secs)
You searched for: Savine Collection ».

This note tells you that 226 titles [as of today’s date— August 6, 2009] were found in the Internet Archive, and that the first 50 of these are shown on this (first) page. At the very bottom of this page are the numbers [1] 2 3 4 5, which indicate subsequent pages of the search results. You can skip to any page in the list by clicking on the number of the desired page. The list consists of abbreviated bibliographical descriptions.

When you click on any title, a page with three frames will open. In the largest, right-hand frame, the title will appear in transliterated form on a dark-red background, followed by additional bibliographic information below. In the left-hand frame, titled View the book, the following formats are available: Read online; PDF; B/W PDF; EPUB; Kindle; Daisy; Full text; and DjVu:

Illustration 2.

Read online

If you click Read online, you will get a view that looks like the book "opened out": You can "turn the pages" back and forth, to read or look through the book, by clicking on either of the pages. Unfortunately, searching the text itself in this format is not yet possible for Russian books. The Read online format works in both Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (Fx). This format allows you to view facing pages at the same time, or just one at a time; to enlarge and reduce the view of a page; to open the book to a particular page; and to have the pages turn automatically (the speed at which they turn is determined by the Internet Archive). The "control bar" for these functions is located just above the image of the book's pages as shown in Illustration 3.

Illustration 3.

The Read online format uses images only; thus, copying parts of the text from this view is not possible. If you want to select/highlight some of the text to copy and paste into your own document, you will need to open the book in the Full Text format.

When you use either Read online or Full Text format, the text (or images) is/are downloaded into a temporary folder on your computer, and the download can take a relatively long time, depending on the file's size and how fast your Internet connection is. You can save these files on your computer.

PDF

The PDF format is also an image, so that copying text is also impossible with this format. This format shows a color image. When you open a text in PDF format, you may see a window asking you whether you want to save the file to your computer. If this message appears, and you want to save the file, click on the Save button; if you want to open the file, click the Open button; and if you decide not to use the PDF format, click the Cancel button.

B/W PDF (Black and White PDF)

Some text images are easier to read in black and white. For example, in the color image of the book O chekhoslovatskikh legionerakh v Sibiri, 1918-1920 : vospominaniia i dokumenty, by Aleksandr Kotomkin, the contrast between the text and the yellowed paper is not very clear. For some people, this makes reading the text on the color image difficult; however, they find that they can read the text in the black and white PDF quite easily. The Internet Archive also contains books digitized by the Google Books project. While the Google Books site has only the color PDF format, the Internet Archive makes B/W PDF also available for these books.

Full Text

Digitization of the texts in Full Text format is done using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. Russian émigré publishers often used the old orthography, and the OCR program used by Internet Archive is sometimes incapable of recognizing certain letters: thus, you will see non-alphabetic symbols in the place of these letters. In addition, you will see blank areas with some of these symbols instead of illustrations. Despite these shortcomings, this format allows you to copy text or to search for Russian words in the text itself using your browser's (IE's or Fx's) Find function. To do a search, press Ctrl and F simultaneously. When the Find window appears (at the bottom of the window in Fx, or as a popup window in IE), type in the word or phrase you are looking for, and the browser will highlight the first occurrence in the text. You can continue to click Next to have the browser search again for the word, until it finds the last occurrence of the word (or phrase) in the text, up to the end of the book. If you click Previous, the browser will search backward from the last place it found the word/phrase, up to the beginning of the book.

DjVu

Just as with the PDF formats, the text in the DjVu (pronounced déja vu) format is an image. Thus, at present you also cannot search within the text in this format.

HTTP

If you click the HTTP link, you will be shown a list of all the files related to the particular book. From this list, you can select individual files to download to your computer.

The materials in the Collection are being digitized in batches that are grouped according to particular subjects or themes. As of today's date (June 3, 2009), nine thematic groups have been established. As the materials are processed, cataloged, and digitized, additional thematic categories will be established, and the existing groups will be supplemented with new materials. Each thematic category has a corresponding code:

You can find all the digitized materials from the Collection that belong to a particular thematic category by typing in the applicable code for the category in the main Internet Archive search window. For instance, to find materials on military history and the Whites' movement, type savmil in the search box and then follow the instructions as given in section 2. above ("Searching the Internet Archive").