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This project to prepare a comprehensive bibliography of Bosniaca holdings of the University of Michigan Library -- works from or primarily about Bosnia and Hercegovina -- was initiated in fall 1995 by the Working Group on Southeast European Studies at the University of Michigan (U-M). A joint initiative of the U-M Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) and International Institute, the Working Group was established in 1994 to promote scholarship on and in Southeast Europe. As part of its responses to calls for international assistance from librarians at the National and University Library of Bosnia and Hercegovina in Sarajevo (NULBH), the Working Group determined that a bibliography of U-M’s Bosniaca holdings could provide a valuable tool for use in reconstituting NULBH collections. Given the importance attached to scholarship on Southeast Europe at U-M , the Bosniaca bibliography could also assist in collection development at U-M.
The Working Group assigned primary
responsibility for supervising the work of several U-M students, consulting
with librarians and scholars in the US and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
final editing to Janet Crayne, Associate Librarian, U-M Library Slavic
Division, and Donna Parmelee, CREES Program Associate.
The project’s goal has been to develop a comprehensive list of University of Michigan Library holdings that fit at least one of the criteria for "Bosniaca": any document about Bosnia and/or Hercegovina or published on the historical territory of Bosnia and/or Hercegovina. To retrieve as complete a body of information as possible, three overlapping search strategies were used.
First, to find items "about Bosnia and/or Hercegovina," a subject-specific keyword search was done to retrieve catalog records containing the word "Bosnia" or "Hercegovina" in Library of Congress Subject Headings. Since the number of records retrieved was too large for the individual items to display, subsequent searches were qualified by date of publication, thus enabling the full display of each catalog record. A sample search is: <k=(Bosnia or Hercegovina).su. and 1971.dt1.>.
Second, to retrieve items published "in Bosnia and/or Hercegovina," a keyword search for place of publication was repeated for publishing centers in Bosnia, Hercegovina, other states formerly part of Yugoslavia, as well as other cities that played historically important roles in Bosnia and Hercegovina. When necessary, these city-specific searches were also qualified by date of publication. A sample search is: <k=Sarajevo.260.> (with "260" indicating the field that contains the place of publication).
Third, to ensure identification of relevant language and literature items that were not identified using the previous two search strategies, a sequence of searches based on call number ranges were done to retrieve language and literature texts written by authors born on the historical territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Authors’ names were searched in various lexica of writers, including: Safet Beg Basagic’s Bosnjaci i hercegovci u islamskoj knjizevnosti (1986); Dejan Durickovic’s Bosanska vila: bibliografija (1975); Muhsin Rizvic’s Pregled knjizevnosti naroda Bosne i Hercegovine (1985); Predrag Palavestra’s Knjizevnost mlade Bosne (1965); and Jugoslovenski knjizevni leksikon, 2. dop. izd. 1984, edited by Zivojin Boskov, et al. (1984). Atlases and gazetteers, both in print and on the World Wide Web, were used to confirm locations of authors’ places of birth. A sample call number search is: <c=pg 1418>.
The date span for material in this bibliography is all-inclusive, with newly cataloged titles continuously added to the collation over the course of the project. Periodic supplements, containing newly cataloged items as well as items missed in this initial edition, will be provided as needed. Language and linguistics texts falling under the rubric of Bosniaca will be added later following selection by an expert for appropriateness.
After examining the possibility
of using bibliographic software and given constraints of time and other
resources, it became clear that display of diacritics and production of
a database including basic citations as well as subject, keyword, and other
cataloging fields would not be possible. With a more modest goal to produce
an acquisitions tool, we opted to use summary bibliographic screens of
U-M Library’s online catalog as the basis for bibliographic entries. All
entries in the bibliography were edited and then arranged alphabetically
by main entry. If a single person or corporate body authored a title, then
the author’s name precedes the title. If a title is a compilation, rather
than an authored work, then the title appears first as an entry. All second
authors and other contributors follow a slash after the title. Series appear
last in parentheses. Publication dates are followed by a dash when the
publication is/was intended to be published in sequential issues or volumes.
We would like to thank the University of Michigan Working Group on Southeast European Studies for its contributions to and support for this project. This was a collegial effort in its best sense. In this regard we would like to express our special appreciation to friends and colleagues, particularly those at the University of Michigan and at the National and University Library of Bosnia and Hercegovina in Sarajevo, for their help in realizing our goal.
February 1997
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