Russian, East European and Central Asian Collections Overview

UW's Suzzallo and Allen Libraries house one of North America’s leading library resources for Russian and East European studies.  Reflecting the broad geographic and interdisciplinary scope of UW's Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies and of UW’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Library’s collection is the most comprehensive in the Pacific Northwest Region, numbering in August 2005 some 420,000 books, 9,200 periodical titles, 500 video recordings, and tens of thousands of microforms. 

Areas of subject strength are Slavic and Eurasian languages and linguistics, literature, history, contemporary politics and economic conditions, demography, ethnology, folklore, art, and music.   More recent subject areas include human rights, environmental studies, women’s studies, and cinema.  The collection has five main geographic regions of focus:   Russia, Ukraine and Belarus; the Baltic Countries; East Central Europe; Southeastern Europe; and Central Asia. 

Since the collapse of the region's communist governments in 1989-1991, publishers throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been racing to reveal the countless true and imaginative stories previously suppressed under authoritarian regimes, while having simultaneously to document the dramatic social changes now transforming the region.  To keep pace with this flood of information, each year the Russian and East European collection grows by an average of 7,000 newly acquired books, issues of 2,400 currently acquired periodicals, and numerous titles in microfilm, video, or electronic format. 

Contact us.  Direct interactions with a wide range of UW students and faculty seeking specific information are one of the principal ways we learn about the University community's library and research needs. 

Materials are located throughout the UW Libraries’ system, with the greatest concentrations found in Suzzallo Library’s main, periodical, and reference stacks.  Because open stack space for all of the Library’s growing collections is finite, an increasing number of older books and periodicals must be relocated each year to remote storage facilities; these materials can be found and paged by using UW’s online catalog, but they are unfortunately no longer findable by browsing the shelves.   A brief guide to the major call number ranges and locations of the Russian and East European collection is provided here, as well as guides for searching the online catalog in the most effective possible way.