Authors

Katalin Rac¹; Sofia Slutskaya¹;  ¹ Emory University Library, United States

Discussion

We explore the changes in knowledge production and bibliographic description following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We are particularly interested in learning about the scholarly community’s response to political changes and armed conflicts. Our hypothesis is twofold: first, we expect that the geopolitical transformation of the region and the wars there affected the scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences not only in the countries once part of the Soviet Union, but worldwide as well. This reaction also manifests itself as scholars foreground some topics while relegating others to the background. Second, we assume that the library catalog is a tool to trace transforming trends in academic research, and more than that, it makes it possible to demonstrate the ways in which scholarship is described for the scholarly community. 

In our research, we focus on our institutional catalog and analyze materials pertaining to the study of the area of the former Soviet Union, published between 1989 and 2023. We analyze the data along particular variables: subject headings and call numbers and examine them against the backdrop of the history of the region in the past three decades. 

In doing so, we aim to see the shifts in the scientific discourse reflected in the metadata over time. We highlight that the language of the bibliographic description indicates the biases and practices of catalogers and the limitations of the description tools. The analysis has significant practical repercussions: selectors, catalogers, and metadata librarians have a profound influence—often greater than the scholars’—on how library users understand, discover, and access scholarly content.