New Orleans, LA
November 17, 2007
10 :15 am - 12:15 pm

Attending: James Simon (CRL), Dan Pennell (Pittsburgh), June Farris (Chicago), Nadia Zilper (Chapel Hill), Harold Leich (LC), Wook-Jin Cheun (Indiana), Liladhar R. Pendse (UCLA), Ernest Zitser (Duke), Brad Schaffner (Harvard), Todd Bludeau (Praxess Associates), Zina Somova (Eastview), Larry Miller (Illinois), Jessica Brau (Eastview), Michael Brewer (Arizona), Michael Biggins (Washington), Karen Rondestvedt (Stanford), Heghine Hakobyan (Oregon), Geoff Husic (Kansas), Jon Giullian (Kansas), Diana Greene (NYU), Janet Crayne (Michigan), Ksenya Kiebuszynski (Toronto)

1. Welcome and Introductions
   June welcomed the group.
   1. Minutes of the 2006 meeting were reviewed and approved.
   2. Executive committee elections:
      Wook-Jin Cheun, Indiana University, Secretary, 2007-2009
      Jon Giullian, University of Kansas, Member at Large, 2007-2009
2. Budget Report/CRL News
   1. CRL report: Global resources network administered long-term by CRL, has been going successfully. CRL continues to work on existing projects on French and German language resources, African newspapers, and Latin America. No Slavic project is currently planned, some Greek studies librarians have been trying to get a new modern Greek program started following a recent conference in Greece.
      
      GRN co-sponsored a human rights conference with Columbia and Texas in conjunction with Columbia’s acquisition of the archive of Amnesty International and other organizations. The overall concern is that human rights trials/criminal tribunals need to have a repository so that evidence are preserved and accessible.
      
      CRL is working on expanding digital projects in response to demand, placing materials on its document delivery server. CRL has capacity for various types of microforms.
      
      CRL purchase proposal nominations have been balloted. A number of Slavic-related materials are on the ballot.
   2. SEEMP Budget Report: Last fiscal year (FY07), SEEMP brought in $20,400 in revenue and there were $15,721 in expenditures. This fiscal year (FY08), SEEMP had a beginning balance of $35,117. Revenues are currently $17,400, current expenses $674. Current commitments total $21,408. SEEMP has $30,435 available for new projects.
      Generally haven’t received new proposals this year.
   3. Brief Project Updates: Kohe Jone, now complete Oslobodjenje, archival guides and right wing papers yet to be completed.
3. New proposals
   1. Oslobodjenje: Janet Crayne talked about knowing someone in Sarajevo who has the 1993-1995 run of the title. The 1992-93 reel(s) lost in the mail from first filming attempt, three months of 1992 exist on CD-Rom, so this part of run could be excluded from the cost. She wants to get permission from the parent publisher of Oslobodjenje. In Sarajevo, the intention is to film and digitize the whole run and Oslobodjenje’s publisher would get the royalty. Janet has found other microfilmer who says that per reel cost could be negotiated downward after the disastrous experience with first filmer. Janet is asking about using non-CRL filmer, Praxess.
   2. Ukrainian DP press digitization: Ksenya Kiebuszynski has been working for 5 years on Free University’s (Munich) holdings of Ukrainian DP camp records. The building at Free University where materials held on the verge of being closed and there is concern that the materials will be sent to Ukraine and not preserved. Ksenya has been comparing holdings, but they aren’t systematically catalogued and range from 1945-55 so it is difficult to measure whether they exist anywhere else. Harvard has some and Toronto has a good bit. Ksenya knows institutions with which complete runs can be assembled and now has about 200 titles. A complete run would really give a sense of daily life of the camps and of the literary culture of displaced people. Ksenya would like to try and limit titles to those for which complete runs can be identified.
   3. Projects from floor: there was not enough interest in Armenian periodicals, but three other proposals were brought by Janet Crayne
      a. Regional newspapers to include Judaica
      b. Russian rock, latter consisting of three regular archival size boxes (ephemera [posters, newsletters, periodical issues])
      c. Yeltsiana (2 boxes) consisting of ephemera (ballots, posters, photos, lots of periodicals, political mailings).
      Important to be on same page in terms of de-duping what we already have in the Russian regional newspapers project.
      
      Michael Brewer raised the copyright issues relevant to all of these potential projects, Ksenya said that we are really talking about preservation rather than commercial copy.
      Nadia Zilper said putting guides on line to see what the collections are before SEEMP would make a decision made to film, digitize and share would be very important.
      Janet raised need to pool resources in order to avoid duplicating each others’ efforts (Larry mentioned MIPP sent Illinois boxes of election material).
      James raised the issue that it is important to distinguish whether filming being done for preservation or for commercial resale and the motivation for vendors getting involved.
      
      Karen raised idea of archiving Russian political websites, Hoover interested but has not worked up a proposal and wonders whether to get SEEMP involved. Effort is very labor intensive because have to harvest the information. James will poll all of the AMPs for interest in doing this kind of thing—i.e., using AMP funds to pay for a service to archive political web sites.
      Karen said she would take the matter up with Anatol Shmelev at Hoover.
      
      James said current phase of Russian regional newspapers done, but would need a new proposal for new titles to continue the project.
4. Progress Reports on Current Projects
   1. Zina from Eastview reported on regional archives and that another 25 reels are on the way from Moscow and expects the project to be completed by early next year. Institutions will probably receive their copies by February.
   2. Regional newspapers also almost done, three more reels to come in January. James and June commented that gaps have arisen in runs of newspapers because their continuation requires a formal proposal and ask whether we could have a discussion on how to handle this. June indicated that she would pose in this question on the SEEMP listserv.
   3. James reported that CRL has received boxes from two partners for right wing newspapers that have been sent out for filming.
5. Member Reports/Vendor Reports
   1. Nadia mentioned “Beyond Russia” database core module (materials of Andrei Savine) has been deployed on UNC website—completion will take another two years and support obtained for continued cataloging of collection.
   2. Ksenya mentioned Canadian government’s participation in multicultural Canada project by microfilming 75-100 titles of Ukrainian Canadiana, 100,000 pages of Dukhovor collection pertaining to emigration to Saskatchewan.
   3. James said he was contacted about filming Mongolian newspaper held by Indiana, Wook-Jin said he would look into it.
   4. June said CIC Midwest group signed contract with Google for digitization, but specific institutional contributions to project still being worked out, Chicago may contribute Czech and Hungarian materials.
   5. Todd Bludeau said that Praxess distributing periodical titles through National Library of Estonia and also Hungarian newspapers, including Magyar Nemzet, in effect continuing what Ross began but never finished.
   6. Eastview recently signed a contract for digitizing Moscow Times, new Ukrainian archival materials and a few Latvian and Lithuanian materials.
6. Other Business
   1. James raised ideas about digitization and preservation—CRL still considers its microfilm copy to be the archival copy—however, standards are evolving. CRL is doing more digital certification work and verifying that digital archives are indeed doing what the say they are doing.
   2. Cooperative Slavic digital project: TICFIA grants are rolling around in about a year, so the group should consider whether there are ideas for cooperative projects. TICFIA focuses on foreign innovative projects for materials not accessible in the US so we would need foreign partners to obtain these grants. U. of Washington had project for acquiring data helping with GIS image components consisting of socio-economic data on Russian regions in the transition period and an image database. Also, the University of Washington has an NEH project to digitize William Brumfeld’s collection of Russian architecture.
      
      Adding to Letopis zhurnalnykh statei for post 1975?
      Harry Leich mentioned World Digital Library (WDL) unveiled in Paris in October with Librarian of Congress James Billington in attendance, but question persists whether it will be taken over and maintained by UNESCO or some other party. LC considers that WDL supersedes the bilateral projects with various foreign partners.
   3. James mentioned other area of potential collaboration on Open Society archive—possibly involving exchange of microfilm or collaborating on preservation of materials held—samizdat archives, especially periodicals, is a potential digital project. Janet asked about copyright issues associated with this, James thought RFE materials something this collaboration might produce broader access to. Duncan Perry donated his RFE papers to Michigan.
      
      June asked members to review Open Society proposal lists to think about whether a lot of what is on list is already commercially available and held by member institutions. Several people mentioned that this list a very general one made available to CRL rather than constituting specific projects for SEEMP. James will ask for an update from Katalin Dobo about possible areas of collaboration with SEEMP for new projects, such as filming Russian regional newspapers and the Russian unofficial press, mentioned in no. 5 of her 2004 email to James, which was distributed at our meeting.
   4. James mentioned CRL requesting feedback on preservation of reference titles, like World Book Encyclopedia and older editions of such materials. Who is holding on to these is an open question.
      In Slavic area, these kinds of reference books do not come out in as many editions as the World Book and older editions wind up in storage rather than being de-accessioned.
   5. June mentioned will be series of e-mails in coming weeks concerning calendar for proposals, etc.

Submitted by Dan Pennell.