Collection Guidelines: Slavic Studies: Subject Definition

These guidelines pertain to the acquisition of materials from and about Russia, the Baltic Region, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia for inclusion in the collections of the University of Washington Libraries, Seattle.

This interdisciplinary collection supports the teaching and research of faculty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Baltic Studies Program, and the interdisciplinary Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Program (REECAS) of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.  It also supports research by graduate and upper divisional undergraduate students in any UW department or program (Anthropology, Art History, Geography, History, Music, Political Science, Sociology, etc.) for whom Russia, the Baltics, Eastern Europe or Central Asia are a primary object of research interest.

For more information about the UW Libraries' Slavic collecting priorities not addressed in these pages, contact UW's Slavic, Baltic and East European studies librarian, Michael Biggins.

The term Slavic and East European studies is used at the UW Libraries to refer to learning, teaching and research in any discipline as it applies to Russia, the former Soviet Union, the Baltic countries, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe (the Balkans), the Caucasus, and former Soviet Central Asia.  Although sometimes referred to as Slavic studies for brevity's sake, Slavic is a specific ethnonym applicable only to national groups united by the use of a Slavic language (e.g., Russians, but not Estonians or Uzbeks; Poles, but not Lithuanians, Hungarians or Georgians), so it is both technically and politically more correct to use the terms Slavic and East European studies or Slavic, Baltic and East European studies.  The acronym REECAS (Russian, East European and Central Asian studies) is still more inclusive by bringing in all post-Soviet space.

Slavic and East European studies at UW involves some 40 full-time core faculty members spread across fifteen departments, as well as an additional 15 affiliated faculty.

Slavic and East European materials are located throughout the UW Libraries system in all subject classifications.  The following table shows the call number ranges of the most significant concentrations of material: