The Annotated catalogue will include 30-35 short entries (up to 2 pages each) describing visual and narrative aspects of individual publications.

In preparation for the symposium the selected 46 books underwent digital imaging, and the high-resolution digital surrogates were mounted as a publicly accessible collection in the Princeton University Digital Library (“Soviet Era Books for Children and Youth 1918-1938”). These 46 books were selected from the Cotsen’s holdings of approximately 1,500 Soviet-era Russian imprints, almost 1,000 of which were published between the 1917 Revolution and the beginning of WWII.

All of the selected imprints are very rare; a third of the editions included are held in only one other collection in North America, and more than a third are not held in any other North American collections. Invited scholars and other prospective symposium participants will choose books from this digital collection and will be able to work remotely with these digital versions to produce their submissions for the catalog. The catalog entries will have a submission deadline in fall 2014 to allow time for the catalog to be compiled in advance of – and available for discussion at – the workshop.

The aim of the catalog is  to map the visual and verbal languages of the books in the digital collection, and to identify the various kinds of valuable data that can be extracted from these documents.