Library Receives Grant to Catalog Rare Russian Periodicals

photo of andre savine

André Savine, 1946-1999

A grant of $218,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund cataloging for more than 1,616 rare, primarily Russian-language periodicals at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.

The serials are part of the André Savine Collection, which the Library acquired in 2002. Savine, a book dealer and owner of Le Bibliophile Russe bookstore in Paris until his death in 1999, amassed a collection of more than 60,000 items documenting the lives of Russians who lived in exile, from the 1917 revolution onward.

cover of invalid journal

Cover of the journal Invalid
from the André Savine Collection

The Library estimates that one-third of the serial titles in the Savine Collection are held by no other library and that only a few institutions worldwide have significant holdings of the remaining titles. Some are thought to be unique, such as the handwritten journal Invalid that White Russian Army personnel produced in 1920 and 1921 at their encampment on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. Once cataloged, the serials will be available for consultation in the Library's Rare Book Collection.

The serials cataloging project is part of the Library's multi-phased endeavor to maximize access to the Savine Collection. A 2005 grant, also from the Mellon Foundation, helped to create the Core Module of the Russia Beyond Russia Digital Library that serves as an index hub for the full text modules that will be added in the future. The Core Module enables scholars to search and read Savine's original research and his annotations of materials in the collection. Serial records created under the new grant will contain links to Core Module records, providing rich context for researchers who encounter the serials via the Internet or OCLC's WorldCat.

The cataloging grant will run Jan. 1, 2008, through June 30, 2010. The Library plans subsequent projects to catalog and eventually digitize the entire Savine Collection, including serials, monographs, manuscripts, visual materials, and ephemera, and to link digitized documents to the catalog and Core Module records.