"Harvard Project" now online

[Katia Dianina]

“Harvard Project” Now Online
   
  HPSSS Online is a web resource that makes the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System accessible to researchers and students worldwide for the first time.  A project coordinated by David Brandenberger, Terry Martin and Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies along with Harvard College Library’s Slavic Division and its Library Digital Initiative, this resource should be of considerable interest to the field.
   
  The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System is a collection of some 700 interview transcripts conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War.  A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, it boasts vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions.  The HPSSS’s value is compounded by the fact that it was compiled in English and organized according to a rigorous social science framework.  Ultimately, the HPSSS’s breadth, depth and English-language accessibility endow it with enormous potential, both as a pedagogical tool in the classroom and within a wider community of specialists on Soviet history, literature and cultural studies.
   
  Never published, the HPSSS’s original interview manuscript ditto-masters were bound together into some 61 volumes in 1951 for deposit in the Harvard College Library system.  In the years since, problems of access and poor indexing have hampered effective utilization of the HPSSS; these factors have been compounded in recent years by age-related degradation of the ditto-master originals.  The HPSSS Online resource, therefore, ought to revolutionize use of the HPSSS by making virtually all the materials associated with the project available to the world community within the framework of a fully searchable electronic database.
   
  Access to the HPSSS Online resource is unrestricted and reachable either directly or through the search function within Harvard College Library’s OASIS page delivery system:
   
  http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/index.html
   
  http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/advancedsearch?_collection=oasis
   
  
  A guide to using the project has also been posted on the site that details the methodological limitations and possibilities of this online resource at some length:
   
  http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/working_with_hpsss.pdf
   
  
 

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