A Search for Research – Mapping Archives in a Time of War (online resource collection)Location: Location: Online | Workplace: Remote
Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, fundamentally changed how scholars in the social sciences and humanities could conduct research in Ukraine and Russia. Concerns for personal safety, government-issued travel warnings, and university policies limiting travel have made archives in those countries inaccessible to most scholars located outside the region. “A Search for Research: Mapping Archives in a Time of War” stands as a centralized hub for scholars to locate needed archives and documents and serves as a platform to generate conversation and collaboration.
This project is sponsored by Michigan State University (MSU) and is funded by the Tetrad Initiative, which is designed to foster new cross-unit and cross-college collaborations among MSU faculty who have not worked together before. By using H-Net's platform, we can engage the thousands of users interested in East European and Eurasian Studies by providing spaces for scholarly conversation and sharing resources.
For phase one of this project, we are gathering information via a survey about archives and libraries around the world that have primary source collections related to Ukraine and Russia but are located outside those countries. We will use that information to create an interactive map that contains information on those collections and how to access them. We intend for the map to be available in late 2024. It will highlight little-known archives and provide a global scope of available primary sources.
We are actively seeking organizations that have primary source collections related to Ukraine and/or Russia to complete our survey for inclusion on our interactive map. If you work for or know of a university, library, museum, local heritage society, or other organization that might fit this description, please share our survey with them or email our team at searchforresearch.dh@msu.edu. Our survey is also asking archives with limited financial means to share their information if they would be interested in receiving assistance in digitizing a selection of their collections to be hosted on the H-Net platform.
If you have further questions about the “A Search for Research” project, please email our team at searchforresearch.dh@msu.edu.