Why do Central Asian librarians enter the profession, and how do they decide which educational strategies to pursue in developing their careers? Using 13 conversations and 10 qualitative interviews with Kazakh and Kyrgyz librarians, this chapter finds that librarians enter the profession due to personal interest, by happenstance, or for university funding and continue when they perceive an opportunity for career growth as well as salary mobility. Central Asian librarians evaluate their educational options, including local bachelor's degrees; distance education from Russia; MLIS programs in Asia, Europe, or America; and short-term online training, while balancing family responsibilities and career prospects in and outside of librarianship. Prospects for creating a local MLIS or other improved professional training programs are discussed.

Librarians in America and Europe find that social scientists rely heavily on journal articles, specialized data, and feedback from colleagues in directing their research. This project uses 21 ethnographic interviews with librarians, students, and faculty at “Atameken University” in post-Soviet Kazakhstan to explore how social scientists adjust such research habits to a context of distant information sources and limited access. By developing technological adaptations to the local context, expatriate scholars can surmount most barriers to access—and yet librarians are then less able to effectively support research. Increased access to information and skilled librarians remains essential for Eurasian universities seeking to support world-class research in the developing world.

A brief article that explores how and why academic book awards are proliferating, and how anthropology book awards may be used in academic library collecting.

Ethnography is a way of understanding not just what people say, but what they do within their larger environment. In libraries, ethnography is used to understand how patrons interact with each other and with our information resources. Ethnographic methods includes tools such as observation, interviews, photo diaries, mapping, and in-person focus groups—and the digital age has expanded our toolkit to study users using things like digital surveys and observations. This paper presents reflections on ethnographic and user experience projects at the National Academic Library and Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, and at Colby College and UC Berkeley in America, highlighting the methods used and the ways in which collaboration strengthened the outcome. A final section notes both challenges and opportunities for truly effective collaborative work—and how important collaborative study of social science research is for developing libraries that fully meet these users’ needs.

This article seeks to outline the use of controlled vocabulary standards for qualitative datasets in cultural anthropology, which are increasingly held in researcher-accessible government repositories and online digital libraries. As a humanistic science that can address almost any aspect of life with meaning to humans, cultural anthropology has proven difficult for librarians and archivists to effectively organize. Yet as anthropology moves onto the web, the challenge of organizing and curating information within the field only grows. In considering the subject classification of digital information in anthropology, I ask how we might best use controlled vocabularies for indexing digital anthropological data. After a brief discussion of likely concerns, I outline thesauri which may potentially be used for vocabulary control in metadata fields for language, location, culture, researcher, and subject. The article concludes with recommendations for those existing thesauri most suitable to provide a controlled vocabulary for describing digital objects in the anthropological world.

This article considers how personal name changes are situated within their sociological context in the United States. Reviewing both popular and scholarly texts on names and name changes, I draw on recent work on identity and narrative by Oriana to argue that voluntary personal name changes are made in relation to a sense of narrative elasticity oridentity elasticity, and act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context. Drawing out these themes through an exploration of name changes for ethnic self-definition or religious purposes, I conclude with a reflection on the unstable social balance between an individual’s interest in self-expression and society’s priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere.

This paper explores the attitudes of librarians in post-Soviet Kazakhstan regarding their roles at the new National Academic Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NAL). Using ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys of library staff (n=24), we find that Kazakhstani librarians either sensed a ‘calling’ to librarianship or ‘fell into’ library careers given life circumstances, and value their library for its contribution to cultural preservation and digital access on a national scale. This pilot project presents NAL to an international community, sharing the voices of Russian- and Kazakh-speaking librarians to highlight the role of libraries in the development of the post-Soviet nation.