Russian, Slavic, East European, Eurasian Studies: Finding Books Unvailable at Penn

If a book is listed as “Unavailable” (in Franklin) or labelled as “Item cannot be checked out at the library but can be requested"  (in Penn's new library catalog), this usually means it’s checked out. Your quickest solution will almost always be Borrow Direct, which gives you direct access to the holdings of several major Slavic Collections on the East Coast.

• If you are looking for a Russian book and can't find it in our catalog, make sure that you have checked it in both Cyrillic and in romanized transliteration. Double-check the spelling of your transliteration. Find transliteration tables at the Library of Congress Romanization Page.
• Use wildcard searching to capture all possible case endings. Instructions for wildcard searching are in the Search Syntax Guide.
• If you still cannot find a book in the Penn Library Catalog, we might actually have it. Check it in WorldCat: due to the vagaries of catalog transliteration, some of Penn's holdings only show up there Once you find the book in Worldcat, copy the title with full diacritics to search for it again in the Penn Catalog.

• If you are looking for a recent, scholarly, university-press publication in English, and it is not in the Penn catalog, look for it at the DeGruyter Platform for University Press books (some of these books will appear first on this platform before migrating into our catalog).

• Use WorldCat FirstSearch to search for books in hundreds of libraries in the United States and several other countries. You will need to be logged in through Penn to search.
• If Penn does not own a copy of the book, you can request it through BorrowDirect, EZ Borrow, or Interlibrary Loan.
• Instructions for these borrowing services are in the Resource Sharing Guide. Connect directly to the request forms at the Resource Sharing Page. You will need to be logged in with your PennKey to access these.