UW-Madison Libraries Orientation - Russia / Eastern Europe / Central Asia : Romanization of Russian and other Cyrillic languages

Romanization of Russian

Library catalogs in the United States and Western Europe typically represent Russian works in Romanized form. Some library catalogs such as UW-Madison's have both the original Cyrillic and Romanized forms, but some cataloging records may not have the Cyrillic, so searching only by the Cyrillic forms may miss some materials. The challenge in searching for Russian materials by their Romanized authors and titles is that there are several Romanization schema. Most academic libraries in the United States use the Library of Congress Romanization scheme (see link below). However many journals have style sheets for their authors that specify a specific Romanization scheme other than the LC scheme. In addition, authors of books are usually free to use whichever scheme they are most comfortable with. Thus the spelling of the author's name or the words in a title may not be in the LC Romanization scheme that the library catalog will use.

Examples:

Zamyatin versus Zamiatin (Zami︠a︡tin, Evgeniĭ Ivanovich) Замятин, Евгений Николаевич

Olesha, I︠U︡riĭ versus Olesha, Yurii (Olesha, I︠U︡riĭ Karlovich) Олеша, Юрий Карлович

Tolstaya versus Tolstaia (Tolstai︠a︡, Tatʹi︠a︡na) Толстая, Татьяна

Ulitskaya versus Ulitskaia (Ulit︠s︡kai︠a︡, Li︠u︡dmila) Улицкая, Людмила

Alexievich versus Aleksievich (Aleksievich, Svetlana) Алексиевич, Светлана

Library of Congress Russian Romanization Table
Library of Congress Romanization Tables
The ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts, is approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association. The dates indicate when they were approved or revised. Tables that lack dates were approved prior to 1997.
Library of Congress Authorities
Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations