As with some other Eastern European databases and catalogs, failure to use diacritics in CEEOL--Central and Eastern European Online Library--can have a major effect on search results. For example, a search for the term "székely" (a Hungarian ethno-historical group) in the full-text Google scholar window yields over 700 results, while a search for "szekely" (without the diacritical mark over the first "e") yields a little over 200 results. This difference in fact represents an improvement in the search interface's recognition of non-diactritic letters--the difference used to be more significant.
For assistance with enabling and using diacritics on your computer, see the Slavic Reference Service's "Fonts & Keyboards" webpage.
The Central and Eastern European Online Library, by the description of the organization's own supporters, "C.E.E.O.L. is an online archive which provides access to full text PDF articles from 1,069 humanities and social science journals and re-digitized documents pertaining to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European topics. C.E.E.O.L. is the result of 10 years of work by the Frankfurt Eastern/Western European Cultural Center Palais Jalta. During the 1990's, the annual book fairs in Frankfurt offered the most appropriate opportunities for networking among publishers, as well as for discussions and all kinds of public events. In 1998, the company QUESTA.Soft GmbH arose from the Cultural Center. From the very beginning, the company started to build up the technical and logistical basis for the future operation of C.E.E.O.L. According to C.E.E.O.L., "the cooperation between PALAIS JALTA and QUESTA.Soft has mirrored the political and cultural, along with the economic intentions, of C.E.E.O.L." This number, focusing on leading humanities and social sciences journals in and/or about the region, is quite a bit more than just a few years ago, indicating how quickly this database has been growing.
"The project's primary concern is to make documents available to a public which can currently only gain limited access when using traditional channels or who have been previously unaware of the existence of these documents." To accompany its growth and make searching easy and powerful, the project has joined forces with Google to provide state-of-the-art search technology for its collection. Because it is full-text, patrons have the ability to search the entire collection by subject and keyword in the Google scholar interface.
As of February 23, 2015, C.E.E.O.L. contained 270,000 full-text articles with more than 3 million scanned pages representing 19,607 issues from 1069 periodical titles. This is roughly a quadrupling of content size from just six years ago. C.E.E.O.L. is continually adding more journal titles.
Lists of periodicals whose full text is included in C.E.E.O.L. can be viewed on a country-by-country basis by clicking on "PERIODICALS" option in the menu. Patrons can also search by subject, which was not always possible. "Show details" to the right of each journal title leads immediately to more information about the journal.
Once you have chosen a particular journal of interest, clicking the "Show Details" link will take you to C.E.E.O.L.'s digital holdings of the journal, with issue-by-issue links to all available articles from that journal. From here you have a choice of again "Show Details" or "View." Choosing Show Details will open some bibliographic information about the article, including author, page range, number of pages, digital file size for downloading, and an annotated description in English. The other tab, "View," will begin the download of the article as a pdf file. An example of a bibliographic description, in this case of the Croatian journal "Holon," follows:
C.E.E.O.L. offers a number of other features, including country-by-country lists of authors. Below we seee a sample page of a Polish law scholar Tomasz Adamczyk and the beginning of a list of his articles.
C.E.E.O.L. has assembled a substantial (if somewhat dated) webliography on a number of aspects of Eastern Europe in its searchable "LINKS" pages. Some of the links for NGOs and foundations in Serbia are reproduced below.
While C.E.E.O.L.'s various search options do not function as well as one would like, the extensive full-text access it provides will be of considerable value to scholars of Eastern Europe.
