Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

The Electronic Datebase on Russian Drama: Creation and Use

A. Kolganova (Russia)

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

We hope that our colleagues know that the Russian State Arts Library is the former Theatrical Library.

During the last three years we have been developing many new trends in our work. The priority is given to the using of computer. At first, I would like to give you a general idea of our computer systems.

Since 1993 we have been maintaining an computer catalogue of recently published titles. We have both Russian and multi-lingual catalogues. This year we have started to create a database on articles from periodicals. I would like to stress that since then we have set up the Art Libraries Association. A number of its members are taking part in our cooperative project aimed to compile a database on Arts periodicals index.

Now we use computers mostly for reference and bibliographic services. We work not only with our own database, but with those compiled by other institutions. For example, the bibliographic descriptions of the Russian Book Chamber and Russian catalogue "Books in Print" provides us with valuable help for the creation of the catalogue.

We also use bibliographic indexes on CD. Reference services, especially when we have to consult theatre and cinema artists or museum agents. We have organized the workstations for reference librarians and cataloguers.

We also are beginning to use computers for our holdings control. We take part in elaboration of some national projects aimed to improve the cataloguing process. The most important of them is the project titled "Russian libraries in INTERNET".

The Russian State Arts Library is also involved in a project goaled to create an electronic database on Russian drama.

At present the bibliographic information on the history of Russian drama is not covered by retrospective indexes existing for other humanitarian fields. The bibliographic survey of all the variety of Russian drama is not only a task for bibliographers or librarians. This information is quite necessary to theatre researchers, producers, actors and publishers. The librarians involved in reference and information services often need such data, but their inquiries concerning publications of new editions and adaptations can not always be satisfied.

For this purpose a special group has been formed which is working on a bibliographic index entitled "Drama in Russia in the XIII-XX centuries". It will be the first bibliographic basis of the computer database on Russian drama history. In time we are going to publish this work in a traditional printed form. (I mean hard copy).

Besides the informational and technological problems, the authors were faced with a number of theoretical and methodological ones. These concerned mainly the problem of criteria for selection of material. The database has to include the description of all published plays: those published as monographs as well as those included in an almanac, or published in periodicals. The desire to create a corpus (the whole range) of Russian drama makes it necessary to cover the plays printed in all kinds of periodicals in which the plays had ever been published. The work is rather simple when we deal with well-known special journals such as "Actor", "Russian Theartre Repertoire", "Panteon of Russian and all European Theatres", "Russian Stage", etc. On the contrary, indexing of theatre almanacs demands a lot of further work. We have to study such publications as "Altsiona" (S-Pb., 1929), "Almanac muz" (Pb., 1916), "Buket" (S-Pb., 1824), "Domashy Theatre" (S-Pb., M., 1816-1817), etc. Primarily the file consists of sixty titles.

The database we are working on includes all the genres of drama. Our task is to reflect the whole body of Russian drama. Russian translations of foreign plays we consider as a part of Russian heritage.

The stage history of Russian drama has its own specifics. The specifics of Russian drama evolution history stage-life is that the plays performed could be both published and unpublished, existing only in the original manuscripts. Therefore, the problem of the manuscript as a drama text is raised.

A necessity to provide similar bibliographic description of manuscripts and books in the same database provokes some difficulties.

We are obliged to elaborate our own rules of description which are based on the international standards and at the same time ought to help us to create an integral information array on Russian drama history.

This theme requires an immense scientific, technological and bibliographic work. We face especially many problems when we make a description of so-called "secondary dramaturgy". These are the plays written after adapted plots or literal remakings. Describing them, sometimes we meet very interesting or difficult cases of author identification, choice of description elements, etc.

The "secondary dramaturgy" in the form of adaptions, translations or conversions of one genre of art into another, played a great role in the cultural exchange. As an example of this kind of dramaturgy we can show stagings or screen-writings of plays.

The information on plays that we actually input into the computer database is taken from the publications kept in the stocks and collections of our library.

The second step should be to add the data of other libraries, collections which have important material on theatre. These are: the Russian State Library (former Lenin Library), the Russian National Library (former Public Library), the Saint Petersburg Theatrical Library, the Library of the Academy of Sciences and the libraries of the Russian Theatre Society. The information from the collections of the Russian State Library and the Russian National Library has partly been included in the database.

A number of publishers have already demonstrated an interest in publication of the bibliographic index after the database on the drama repertoire in books has been compiled.

We also are creating a separate database on published libretti of opera and musicals. After completion of our database on drama and libretti, we are going to publish a multi-volume index in traditional printed form. A separate volume will be on libretti.

It is clear that while working on this theme, which is rather complicated in a bibliographic and theoretical sense, we met a lot of problems. I would like to emphasise the main ones.

Identifying the authors requires considerable research, especially when we deal with remakings or adaptions. The peculiarity of Russian theatre is in its interpretation of an aesthetics, when the play had been staged and published not as a translation, but as a remaking or an adaption of the original text. That is why it is so difficult to identify, step by step, an authors name of the Russian version and of the original text. The number of such adapted plays is rather significant.

We encounter a lot of problems related to libretti where a composer is often at the same time an author or co-author of the text. In Russian drama history a number of bibliographic and textological mysteries which were unclear become unveiled as we progress with our database on drama history.

Totally, we plan to cover about 130,000 titles, including both monographs and plays published in periodicals or almanacs.

When drawing up our program and methodological recommendations, we have foreseen the possibility to use the database in both bibliographic service and researches. For this purpose we have set the data fields for the bibliographic entries that should provide the indexes on author, translator, composer librettist, etc.

All the forms of pseudonyms, real names and biographic data are also covered. A separate index covers play titles, including parallel titles of the original text in the language of the original text.

In this database we use a special format based on the UNIMARC.

There's no reason for me to demonstrate examples in Russian, but I would like to show you the main format that we use in our library.

The database is already being largely used, and we hope, that after its completion, our foreign colleagues will benefit from it, too.

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels14.html