The Hanson History Collection

Since my last post, preliminary work on the Hanson History Collection gift-in-kind has been completed and the materials to be accepted are being appraised. Hooray! To give an idea of the scope of the project, since June I’ve worked through around 2100 items (Russian and English monographs and serials). This was only a portion of the GIK, but was certainly more than enough to keep me busy. Of those 2100 items, 971 (in 767 titles) will make it into our Murray Library collection.

So what, exactly, are we acquiring?

The Russian language monographs and serials comprise a collection of works on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Russia. The collection is concentrated primarily on the Imperial and Soviet eras, with a strong regional focus on Siberia and the Russian Far East. Several titles on the local institutional history of these places can be found, as can ethnographic works with a similar regional focus. Titles on the Stalin era and Soviet labour camps (in particular those in Siberia) figure prominently as well. Imprints generally originate from the USSR, which means that the scholarship collected in these books is a valuable resource complementary to the more accessible Western scholarship of the time, and a unique window on the Soviet view of Russian history.

The Russian language collection also contains several political and cultural publications chronicling the sweeping changes during what was to be the twilight of the Soviet Union, and the early post-Soviet era.

The serials we’re acquiring include major titles in Soviet and Russian history, as well as cultural and commercial publications from the Soviet republics and post-Soviet states including Russia, and the Caucasus and Central Asian countries.

The English language materials will provide the Library with additional copies of key contemporary titles in Soviet/Russian history with high circulation stats, or will fill significant gaps of this kind in our collection.

While there is still plenty to be done, it’s exciting to see this most recent stage of the Hanson History project completed!

The Edney Collection in Humanities and Theatre

As work with the Hanson collection is on pause while the appraisers work their magic, work on David Edney’s gift to the library is once again ramping up. The Edney gift brings to us a multilingual collection in literature and theatre, with titles from France, Spain, and African countries featuring prominently. The local series created for this GIK already includes around 200 titles, with about 350 additions now waiting in the wings. We’re happy to report that the first shipment of materials from this newest batch were shipped off for outsource cataloguing yesterday!