An article in the latest issue of Slavic & East European Information Resources describes what it took to compile the ECC's online Guide to Open Access Historical News Sources from Slavic, East European and Eurasian Countries, which was prompted by “the increase in user demand for remote access to online resources” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Co-authored by two ECC Slavic librarians, Ernest A. Zitser (Duke University Libraries) and Bogdan Horbal (New York Public Library), this article “outlines the selection criteria, describes the guide’s layout, and provides a survey of preliminary usage statistics.” It argues that current online guides, such as those created by the Russian National Library and the Library of Congress, "offer useful access points to a large corpus of material, especially digitized historical newspapers from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Yet until recently, there has not been a concerted effort to provide such access points specifically for open access (OA) historical news sources, broadly defined."
The Guide to Open Access Historical News Sources from Slavic, East European and Eurasian Countries, which is hosted on the ECC's website under "Resources," is a collaborative project to fill in this gap in the existing bibliographic literature.
[Header Image: Selected issues of Russian American newspapers. Library of Congress European Division.]