Claire B. Blog 9: Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era

Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era presents a (small) selection of book covers of over 350 Soviet children's books published in the 1920s and 30s now housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries.

Collection Principles

Among the many radical changes in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution, the transformation of children's books offers a bold reminders of the vast ambitions of the new social order. Building simultaneously upon the progressive legacy of the 19th century Russian literature and upon the tradition of Russian Futurism, a linguistic, literary and artistic movement that galvanized Russian intellectuals in the early decades of this century, post-Revolutionary publishing for children evolved quickly. The site claims that in the first decade after the Revolution, general book production climbed from 26,000 to 44,000 titles a year; the number of copies published rose from 133 million to 190 million. Children's books naturally followed the mass trend and a first printing of 100,000 and up was common.

Certain state publishing houses were exclusively concerned with publishing for children. Propaganda for Communist education was one factor, along with the publications' serving as a creative outlet for authors and artists looking for an alternative publishing medium to books for adults. The books in this collection are written in a variety of languages. Since more than 100 nationalities live within the fifteen former republics of the USSR, Russian may have been the official language of the Union but children's books were published in Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tartar, Kazakh, Azerbaidzhani, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, lakutian, Nanaian and other languages are well.

The exhibition is organized in eight groups - thematic exhibitions within the site - meant to demonstrate the importance of Soviet literary production following the Revolution. The collection is organized in such a way that items are only viewable within their corresponding exhibitions. A short introduction clues viewers into certain design aspects to look for, and each exhibit has an introduction as well, but exploration is not really the purpose here (and is virtually impossible to someone who does not read the languages in which the books were written).

Object Characteristics

Within each exhibition, book covers appear as thumbnails and JPEGs.

Metadata

There is minimal metadata associated with each image, but the basics are there: title (in the language in which the book was written), author, description (i.e., size of book and number of pages), and occasional notes about illustrations in the book. This is great if you speak Lithuanian, Georgian, Nanaian, or what have you. Not so great if you don't. There are no call numbers or locations for the items in the exhibits if researchers wanted to find a specific title at McGill.

Intended Audience

I'm not too sure, frankly. The images are beautiful to look at, but only a handful have been digitized for each exhibit and information about each exhibit's purpose is somewhat limited. I learned more than I knew about the children's publishing industry in the early 20th century, but I can't imagine the site would be seen as authoritative for either history or literature researchers. Children probably are not the target audience, unlike a site like the International Children's Digital Library. I specifically searched for sites for children since digital libraries and collections seem to rarely target this audience, only to find a disappointing site. I imagine the intended audience is staff and faculty at McGill who are already familiar with this collection and were simply curious to see what the covers would look like online. The site seems like it has not been updated in a few years, so perhaps it was a one-time project to get a sample of a much larger in-house collection online and out to the public.