The Trouble With Bibliographies: Where Is Mezhov When You Need Him?

This is a review of twelve bibliographies that reflect the holdings of the Russian collection in Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii focusing on Siberia, the Soviet/Russian Far East, and Russia in Asia and the Pacific, especially Russians in China. The chosen titles represent a mixture of the great, the average, and not-so-good that the author has used over the past four decades. While there is a question about the usefulness of bibliographies in this digital age, most of the old standards should still play a role in academic scholarship.     

“Seans chernoi magii na Taganke”: The Hunt for Master and Margarita in the Pravda Digital Archive

This article describes the process of tracking down an obscure yet politically and culturally significant Russian theater review, “Seans chernoi magii na Taganke” by N. Potapov, published in Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party from 1918 to 1991. What at first appeared to be a routine reference question turned into a journey full of twists and turns, a quest for the missing review. The purpose of this article is threefold: to highlight some of the challenges that librarians and researchers face when working with Russian, East European, and Eurasian materials; to inform researchers about the capabilities and limitations of the Pravda Digital Archive and similar databases (e.g., Izvestiia Digital Archive, Literaturnaia Gazeta Digital Archive) produced by East View Information Services; and to encourage discussion about the preservation of and long-term access to research materials from the region.     

My Life in Libraries

The article is a memoir of the author's career, which she spent primarily at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. As Slavic Bibliographer there, she organized the Slavic Reading Room in the Slavic and East European Library and was the first head of the Slavic Reference Service. She reinvigorated the American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES). She was a founding member and/or was very active in virtually all of the national and international Slavic librarians' organizations. In addition, she served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Beyond just Slavic librarianship she established the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University of Illinois and served as its founding director. She was also a member of George Soros's Network Library Program Board, part of his Open Society initiative.     

Internships at the Slavic and East European Collection of the Yale University Library

In this article, the author discusses the internship program of the Slavic and East European Collection at Yale University Library, which provides semester-long fellowships to library professionals from Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The program began in 1993 and is ongoing. The author details its history, including how it has been funded, and discusses what the program includes and the logistics of running it. Participants are listed, along with excerpts from some of their final reports and selected post-fellowship activities.     

Rediscovering the Russian National Bibliography

ABSTRACT

East View Information Services is now providing online access to nine serial publications from the Russian National Bibliography, beginning with 1998 issues. Though East View has been successful with large full-text databases for newspaper and journal articles, images, and statistical tables for several years, this was our first project dealing specifically with bibliographic data. Building a platform for bibliographic records has been more difficult than previous projects. The article discusses why the project was so challenging, how various problems were solved, advantages of the online format, and plans for future improvements.     

“Arab Spring is Wake-Up Call for Kim Jong-Il”

This study explores how differently and similarly the liberal and conservative newspapers in South Korea framed the Arab Spring in their opinion sections. By employing a qualitative framing analysis of editorials and columns, it found that the ideological views of the news outlets themselves had a considerable influence on the opinion discourses. Compared to the liberal papers, the conservative papers more persistently linked the Arab Spring to South Korea's confrontation with North Korea and portrayed the North Korean regime as the world's most infamous and brutal suppressor of human rights. While the conservative papers rarely saw the Arab Spring as the result of West-led neo-liberal globalization, the liberal papers characterized the Arab Spring as being part of the resistance to “neo-liberalism.” This ideological divergence media made possible the presentation of a variety of views about a public issue within a South Korean context. However, it is a matter of grave concern that news outlets' ideological orientations can also impede the objective presentation of an international issue or event, such as the Arab Spring.     

The interplay of a biology teacher's beliefs,teaching practices and gender-based student-teacher classroom interaction

Cross-relationships among a Taiwanese seventh-grade biology teacher's beliefs, practices and classroom interaction with either male or female students were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed. Results show that the teacher's classroom practices reflect her teaching philosophy, which she described in interviews held before and throughout the class observation period. Gender-based characteristics clearly play an important role in establishing and maintaining differences in interactions between male or female students and their teacher in this particular classroom. Data collected from classroom observations show that the subject teacher's beliefs concerning boy/girl differences in learning style and classroom participation are reinforced or sustained by her behaviour, which includes unequal distribution of direct questions, unbalanced feedback and encouragement, and a lack of restrictive controls on calling out answers.     

Against democratic education

This is the fourth of five commentaries discussing Zongjie Wu’s essay, ‘Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation’. It argues that he may have committed two methodological mistakes in his contrast between traditional Chinese education and contemporary Chinese (and Western) education: reverse-Orientalism and a form of fundamentalism. It will then argue that the distinction Wu’s essay correctly reveals is not between China and the West, but between forms of a philosophical education and those of the mass education. In contemporary Western democratic education, the philosophical, political, and mass forms of education are collapsed into one, mass education, and by arguing for preservation of philosophical education on a mass level, Wu also implicitly adopts this conflation position. However, this commentary will argue that this conflation needs to be corrected, and the traditional Confucian education actually tries to strike a middle way between, and to correct, the forms of pre-democratic Western education and democratic education.     

Speech and the enterprise of learning

Thomas Reid was familiar with diverse rhetorical theories, but he believed all eloquence displays immutable fundamental rules. This essay examines his philosophy of rhetoric and identifies the principles to which he was committed. These include his classification of knowledge, emphasis on artistic expression, and theory of natural signification.