As my colleagues do, I select a vendor, and place firm orders for the titles. Here at the Smith building, I order books at the request of our Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies.

We moved from Perkins to the Smith building, and Duke’s Slavic collections added a Polish approval plan, and also expanded the original Russian approval plan to also provide Russian fiction, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and some Kazakh and Kyrgyz selections. I handled a wide variety of languages and materials, but later I worked more specifically with Slavic vendors, setting up Russian and Ukrainian orders and copy cataloging. I started working at Duke Libraries in 2001, in the Perkins building, Acquisitions department. Then I completed a PhD in Russian literature from Duke, after a fall semester of dissertation research in Moscow libraries. I got a master’s degree in Russian from UNC-CH, where I also worked as a student assistant in Davis Library. After finishing that degree, my spouse and I moved back to the East Coast, to Durham.

I’m Robin LaPasha, a library associate in the Non-Roman Languages Unit of Duke Libraries’ Monographic Acquisitions Department.įrom the start of college at the University of Montana, I was drawn into the hobby of ‘international folk dancing.’ I have been learning East European and Balkan folk music, dance and crafts ever since-songs, tunes, dances (and folk costumes) from Russia west to Poland, and down through the Balkans to the Mediterranean.

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