At ASEEES, the national Slavic conference I heard a fascinating report from Patrick Loughney of the Library of Congress about the rediscovery of lost U.S. silent films in Russia. Apparently 75 percent of all feature films made by U.S. studios between 1912 and 1930 have been lost. One of the reasons is that silver was used in producing the films, and the studios recycled film stock as much as possible. In 2010, 195 lost U.S. films were discovered in Gosfil'mofond, the Russian film archive. These were silent films that were sold to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and shown there. In most cases the English titles have been lost because they were replaced by not always accurate Russian ones. Gosfil'mofond has restored and made digital copies of 10 of these films on DVDs and has given them to the Library of Congress. More will follow. We were able to see clips from several of these films, and Loughney showed in his comments that these and subsequently restored films will change the history of U.S. cinema as it's been understood up to now. The Library of Congress is looking for lost U.S. silent films in the archives of other countries as well.
How to Keep Track of Digitization Projects
Several sessions focused on the various Slavic digitization projects being carried out by libraries, both in the U.S. and abroad, and the difficulty in keeping track of what's now available. The Digitization subcommittee of the Librarian committee of ASEEES is in the process of compiling a national register of U.S.-based Slavic digitization projects. So far they're being divided into exhibitions, digital collections, such as Hathi, subscription databases, and sites that add value to content by marking them up, not just OCRing them, to allow searching in more depth. Some random examples: Yiddish books of the Russian avant-garde; Soviet posters; Gulag history; children's books of the early Soviet era; historical maps; Russian satirical journals.
This project, however, will not address the mammoth digitization projects now being carried out by all three national libraries in Russia--the State Library in Moscow, the National Library in St. Petersburg, and the new Boris Yeltsin library, also in St. Petersburg. In sessions devoted to these Russian projects I was amazed at the sheer volume of what they are making available: historical documents by region, history of Russian law, Russian history textbooks going back to the 18th century, the history of Russian foreign relations, the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the Soviet atheist movement, pre-1923 books, journals, newspapers, images, etc.
It's not clear to me how we as librarians can help researchers take advantage of these very valuable resources. As Erika Spencer of LC asked in her paper about creating the U.S. Slavic Digital Register, How do we review these projects? How do we keep track of them? How do we create a national bibliography of them?
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