Get an inside view of producing digital information projects Digital technology has provided great opportunities as well as colossal challenges for information professionals at Slavic libraries, collections, and archives. Virtual Slavica: Digital Libraries, Digital Archives presents leading information experts exploring the monumental task of converting Slavic manuscripts and books for presentation in the digital realm. Readers get a clear inside view of how to conquer the various challenges that arise within digital library and archive projects through detailed descriptions of specific projects discussed in easy-to-understand language. Slavic studies present innate problems when attempts are made to allow access to the material over the Internet. The Cyrillic alphabet is just one of the huge stumbling blocks standing in the way of universal access to this important material. Virtual Slavica: Digital Libraries, Digital Archives provides practical strategies for anyone looking for answers to problems within their own virtual information project. Copyright issues, digital reference, text encoding, online translation, presentation issues, and use of grant funding are some the topics comprehensively discussed to give information professionals clear solutions to the issues they may be facing.

The Sword and the Shieldis based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB’s secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network.Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States.Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century.Among the topics and revelations explored are: The KGB’s covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today. KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB’s attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader. The KGB’s use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB’s attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.

It has proved an odd experience to find myself writing a biography at thesame time as my husband, the modern British historian and historiographe Michael Bentley. While I have explored a shadowy tenth-century king, he has worked on the life of a leading twentieth-century historian, Regius Professor, head of a Cambridge college and Vice-Chancellor of his university. Outwardly, our tasks could not be more different: his subject, Sir Herbert Butterfield, left not only a large body of historical writing but also a huge personal archive, complemented by a wider public record. Mine left no personal records at all and, despite his claim to fame as England’s first monarch, is ill-attested in the contemporary record and subsequent historiography. Yet in many ways we have grappled with similar difficulties and have benefited substantially from sharing our methodological perspectives. This life reflects that mutual journey towards making our subjects biographable. ithout Michael’s historical perceptions, his unsentimental criticism and unstinting support, this book would have been greatly impoverished; it is dedicated to him with loving gratitude. He bears no responsibility, however, for my decision to make the attempt, which is one I owe to my former research students, particularly Morn Capper and Martha Riddiford. It was they who first persuaded me that I should resurrect a project first begun as an undergraduate and revitalized by the invitation to write a short biography of бthelstan for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. They went on asking, ‘How’s бthelstan?’ at regular intervals not only until I started to write, but whenever I seemed to be flagging as the project progressed. I hope they – and also Geoff Little, who took with typical equanimity this invasion onto what he might have seen as his own territory – feel that the resulting book was worth the wait. Simon Keynes has been a constant source of information and advice throughout the gestation of the project; he supervised the original BA dissertation from which all followed and has continued to offer help and stimulating advice throughout. That I have not always followed his lead is not for want of his trying to persuade me to see things differently. I could not have completed this without his guidance. At a critical moment – when the project seemed to have flagged to the point of morbidity – Nicholas Brooks provided a badly needed appraisal of what ought to happen, the more valuable for his robust refusal to soften critical recommendations. Susan Kelly has consistently provided much support and substantial assistance with the charter material. I am extremely grateful to George Molyneaux for sharing a chapter of his Oxford DPhil thesis with me and for reading and commenting in detail on two of my chapters, thereby saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. Jinty Nelson and Edmund King have also struggled with writing lives of medieval kings, albeit ones whom history has served a good deal better than бthelstan, and I am grateful for a number of discussions over the years and their advice on specific problems. The completion of the project would have been impossible without a research leave award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for which I acknowledge my gratitude, and also to the History Department at Sheffield for matching that leave and releasing me from teaching and especially administrative burdens. In the final stages my new colleagues in Oxford have offered continuing support. Among them I should thank particularly Judith Maltby, whose sense of what a seventeenth-century king might do and think have often provided helpful comparisons, and also John Watts, who once approached a medieval English monarch’s life from an entirely different perspective. Latterly, Laura Ashe has provided a useful foil on whom to bounce some of my wilder ideas and an invaluable source of advice on points of detail, especially in the translation of Old and Middle English.

From Jewish clothing merchants to Bangladeshi curry houses, ancient docks to the 2012 Olympics, the area east of the City has always played a crucial role in London's history. The East End, as it has been known, was the home to Shakespeare's first theatre and to the early stirrings of a mass labour movement; it has also traditionally been seen as a place of darkness and despair, where Jack the Ripper committed his gruesome murders, and cholera and poverty stalked the Victorian streets. In this beautifully illustrated history of this iconic district, John Marriott draws on 25 years of research into the subject to present an authoritative and endlessly fascinating account. With the aid of copious maps, archive prints and photographs, and the words of East Londoners from 17th-century silk-weavers to Cockneys during the Blitz, he explores the relationship between the East End and the rest of London, and challenges many of the myths which surround the area.