The UW Libraries' collections pertaining to the countries of East Central
Europe: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia comprise about 60,000 volumes and are both broad in subject scope and chronologically deep. Each year UW acquires nearly 2,000 new books from this region--typically including about 1,000 new titles from Poland, 400 from the Czech Republic, 250 from Slovakia, and 300 from Hungary, in addition to new issues of some 500 periodicals and newspapers from all four countries combined.
Primary disciplines supported include history (with particular emphasis on the
post-1945 period), language and linguistics (especially Polish and Czech),
literature and culture, and contemporary politics and economics. Additional
strengths are in art, folklore, cinema studies, and the church history of each
country. There are also extensive holdings of three, four or more major
national newspapers from each of the four countries.
Most recently, the East Central European collection has supported faculty and
student research in the politics of the 1948 communist takeovers in Eastern
Europe, relations between the communist governments and the Catholic Church,
nationalism and anti-Semitism, the politics of the post-1990 media, and the
politics and aesthetics of cinema.
These extensive and diverse holdings for East Central European studies place UW
among the three or four most comprehensive such university library collections
in North America.
