Dear colleagues,
today's ZZF Library Newsletter will focus on the internationalisation of the institute.
As you have probably already noticed, we at the ZZF Library have also been thinking about how we can introduce and retain our ever-growing user base of colleagues, visiting researchers and exchange students whose native language is not German. In addition to the fact that we have been trying to keep all correspondence, notices, announcements and signposting systems bilingual in German and English since last year, we have now been able to establish two other great services that we would like to briefly introduce to you.
Firstly, there was an absolute first for the ZZF Library, although we have to go back a bit in history to understand it (which shouldn't be difficult for us!). At the end of March last year, at the request of colleagues from Department I "Communism and Society", the ZZF library staff held a presentation in the small seminar room on databases with an explicit Eastern European focus, which are offered by "East View" and made available by the ZZF library via a national licence. The small but excellent group identified a desideratum. It was noted that the journal "Soviet Woman", which was published in various languages in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe from 1945-1991, is not available via national licence, even though it would represent real added value for the research of so many colleagues at the ZZF. We then contacted the Eastern Europe department of the Bavarian State Library in Munich (BSB), which is responsible for the specialised information service for Eastern, Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe. After almost nine months of correspondence between Munich (BSB), London (East View) and Potsdam, at the beginning of February this year we succeeded for the first time in setting up a national licence ourselves, which is usually reserved for the big "library tankers"! Since then, we have been able to offer digital access to the entire English-language archive at the Institute (https://dlib.eastview.com/browse/publication/99106/udb/3770/soviet-woman).
We would like to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues Fürst, Kuhr-Korolev, Eisenhuth and Korniienko, who not only provided the impetus for this premiere, but also actively supported it with letters of argumentation. Many thanks again!
The second new feature concerns the visibility of our holdings, which, in addition to our own catalogue (https://vzlbs3.gbv.de/LNG=DU/DB=10/), were previously searchable primarily via the GVK, the GBV's joint union catalogue (https://gvk.k10plus.de/DB=2.1/) and the KOBV, the cooperative library network Berlin-Brandenburg (https://www.kobv.de/). However, since we were now receiving more and more acquisition and interlibrary loan requests from our foreign/foreign-language colleagues with links to WorldCat, we thought it was time for the ZZF library to be visible in the world's largest catalogue. And lo and behold, since last week we are represented in the daily updated WorldCat with a good 60,550 titles: https://search.worldcat.org/de/libraries/112261.
We hope you like our initiative. You are also welcome to mark us as your favourite library, so that you will always be shown immediately whether this or that title is available from us or whether an acquisition or interlibrary loan request is necessary.
Have fun with the new features
the ZZF Potsdam library team
(16.04.2024)