1000 Essential Yiddish Books - Yiddish Book Center

ESSENTIAL YIDDISH BOOKS
1000 Great Works
from the Collection of
the National Yiddish Book Center
INTRODUCTION
Zachary M. Baker
Stanford University Libraries
Two decades have passed since the National Yiddish Book Center assembled its
first core collection of Yiddish books for research libraries. The 1970s and 1980s
experienced an expansion of Yiddish studies in colleges and universities, and library
resources for Yiddish were patchy at best. The Yiddish Book Center’s original core
collections, comprising 500 and 1,000 titles each, responded to this need.
Though the Yiddish Book Center had collected hundreds of thousands of books by the
mid-1980s, the first core collection program was hampered by two major factors:
1. Holdings of many key titles were limited, and they became unavailable once the
supply was depleted.
2. The pages of many volumes were often brittle and bindings were sometimes
damaged as well. The books’ fragility was a serious hindrance to their use.
With the arrival of digital reproduction technology both of these obstacles have
been overcome. Thanks to the Steven Spielberg Digital Library it is now possible
for the Yiddish Book Center to offer a new and reconfigured core collection, in full
confidence that supplies will not run out and that the volumes themselves – which
are printed on acid-free paper – will have a shelf life of hundreds of years. The
approximately 1,000 carefully selected titles in the new core library were drawn from
the National Yiddish Book Center’s continually expanding corpus of digitized texts.
In addition, a number of major works were specially digitized for inclusion in this core
collection. They are available for purchase both individually and as a single collection.
As with the original core collection, bibliographical data for each title is available
online, both in the National Yiddish Book Center’s own catalog and via the Research
Libraries Information Network (RLIN).
413-256-4900 x196 • I