Sunday 29 December 2013

Yale University Press Blocks Access to "Documents of the Soviet Era"

The Russian "Documents of the Soviet Era" website (sovdoc.rusarchives.ru) contained many scans of documents from RGASPI, including a great number of tank-related documents. I have translated a number of these documents on this blog. Upon attempting to access the latest batch, I was faced with a message in broken English, warning me that Yale University Press prohibits access to documents on this website. I was given the "option" to use Yale's website, which somehow manages to be much worse than the relatively primitive but robust RGASPI one, with two critical problems. One is that I can't search in Russian. That wouldn't be that bad, it would still be possible to get the document number from RGASPI and browse manually, but then the second problem comes into play. The RGASPI website was free to everyone. The Yale website doesn't show you the document unless you are a part of an academic institution that pays them money.

Looks like a major archive source is now closed to me (and, therefore, the English speaking public) because some guy somewhere wanted to make more money.

7 comments:

  1. They seem to have taken it over along with their Stalin Archive. I just hate it when universities go ahead and do that kind of thing. Neoliberalism in action.

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  2. Does this refer to the documents marked "CAMD RF"? If so then I'm gonna flip a shit. :c

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    Replies
    1. If Yale bought CAMD, that would probably be the end of me. These are RGASPI documents that I, thankfully, don't rely on as much.

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  3. From where are you trying to access the documents? I'm asking as it might only be a matter of the access being restricted in certain areas. Using a proxy or anonymiser could work around it.

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  4. Yeah, since I can still access that site.

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    Replies
    1. It's not the site that's blocked, but scans of the documents themselves.

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  5. It might be like Björn says that your geographical location is blocked from accessing those documents.

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