In addition to the materials available in the open stacks of Princeton’s on-campus libraries and through the Library’s many electronic subscriptions, Princeton affiliates have access to a vast wealth of materials stored off campus, materials in the Shared Collection of Columbia, Harvard, New York Public Library, and Princeton — the four member institutions of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP). This means direct access to the collections of four of the ten largest North American research collections of materials from and/or about the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia, with materials delivered to campus in most cases within 24 hours of request. The entirety of the Shared Collection is visible and requestable via Princeton University Library’s online catalog. As of 2014 the ReCAP partners began coordinating development of their collections related to this world area, and have since then worked to strategically reduce redundancies and improve collective coverage of materials from and/or about the region’s 26 nation states and in its many more languages. This has included expanding the scope of the collections to include documents and artifacts in new genres and media.

Princeton is also a member of the Ivy Plus Library Confederation (IPLC), which includes the 8 Ivy League libraries, plus the libraries of Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Stanford, and University of Chicago. Materials are shared between the IPLC member institutions through the Borrow Direct network. IPLC also has an active web archiving program, which has several collections of potential interest to REEES students and scholars.

Beyond the ReCAP Shared Collection and Princeton University Library’s own on-campus circulating collections, the Library has rich collections of REEES-relevant rare and unique materials, including numerous rare books, periodicals, musical scores, printed graphic-arts works, and substantial parts of the manuscript legacies of the early twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandel’shtam and Odessa-born religious philosopher Georges Florovsky. Selections from PUL’s collections of REEES-related rare and unique materials have been digitized and mounted in the Digital Princeton University Library: https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic.

The Princeton campus is also in close proximity to a number of other major collections of rare and unique materials of interest to REEES scholars and students, including those of Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Yale University.

About the Librarian

Thomas Keenan (PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale; Master of Library and Information Science, Pratt Institute) has served as Princeton’s Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian since 2013. In this capacity he is responsible for developing the Library’s multifaceted collections related to all aspects of SEEES, in consultation with Princeton’s SEEES faculty and students and in collaboration with his colleagues at Columbia, New York Public Library, and Harvard. He is also responsible for assisting researchers with the productive exploration of those collections and for providing general assistance and support for any and all research and teaching related to the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia.

https://library.princeton.edu/staff/tkeenan

https://thomaskeenan.academia.edu/