Central Asia Newspapers on Film

By Norman A. Ross

Norman Ross Publishing (NRP), based in new York City, was founded in 1972 as a firm specialized in publishing reference books and microfilms. At that time, the company's primary field of interest was American Indian Studies and it published nearly a million pages of government documents, periodicals and unpublished research reports on microform on American Indians, as well as several books and audio and video cassettes.
Since 1990 NRP has been developing a programme in Slavic Studies. As part of our programme, we are currently offering microfilms of more than 100 newspapers in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We are filming current newspapers and historical titles in Latvia and Lithuania, and last October, we began to work on the filming of current Estonian newspapers.

Central Asian newspapers
In St. Petersburg, at the National Library of Russia, we have created more than 400 rolls of microfilms of Central Asian newspapers. We have recently embarked on a programme of filming old Armenian newspapers and also various Gubernski Vedemosti.We try to film the greatest range of newspapers from Central Asia, and as many in the vernacular tongues of the area as possible, although some titles are in Russian. All titles are available individually.
As a book publisher, we have issued more than half a dozen titles in Russian, including two long-lost volumes of the Russian Biographical Dictionary and volume IV of the Siberian Encyclopedia. Neither of these works has ever been superseded by a similar work. We have also published, for the first time, two works left in manuscript form in the 1940s by Russian- born scholars associated with the Prague Archive, and we have reprinted two related works of the same period of which only one or two copies are known to exists in the USA. All of our books are printed on 250-year acid-free paper, bound in buckram to specifications which meet or exceed all of the requirements of library bindings.
NRP is also the international clearinghouse for microfilms from all over the world, We sell newspapers on microfilm from more than 40 countries on all six continents and we sell to libraries all over the world. To facilitate this work we have among our staff, fluency or proficiency in Russian, Polish german, French, Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian.

Publishing Contracts
Over the years we have had publishing contracts with Yale, Princeton, Columbia and new York Universities, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Arizona, the University of South Dakota, the Library of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan, the Public Record Office in London, the New York Public Library, among others.
In addition to the Western Institutions noted we are currently publishing with, among others: National Library of Russia and Ukraine; the Russian State Library; the Historical Museum in Moscow; the Historical Library, Moscow; the Historical Archives, St. Petersburg; the Library of the Academy of Sciences (BAN), St. Petersburg; the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg; the Russian Central Archive of Literature (RasGALI), Moscow; and The Hermitage.