About Our Collections
Today, the U-M Library can boast of being home to one of, if not the, largest collections of Armenian-language materials in North America. The Library has been building its Armenian collections in earnest since the early 1990s, under the guidance of Alan Pollard, who then served as Head of the Library’s Slavic Division. Pollard partnered with the Manoogian family and U-M faculty to identify and obtain significant troves of Armenian materials. For instance, an important early acquisition came via Prof. Gerard Libaridian in the form of the personal archive of Hunchakian Party activist Hampartzoum Arzoumanian (1896–1971).
Pollard’s successor, Janet Crayne, augmented the effort initiated by Pollard, forging new partnerships and increasing significantly the budget for Armenian acquisitions. Crayne took full advantage of the new doors onto Armenia’s publishing market when Garen Harutyunyan (once a cataloger at the Library) started ATC International, a book vendor specializing in Armenia. She continued to use personal connections to obtain unique materials. Professor Libaridian, the former director of CAS, for example, informed Janet about a valuable acquisition he had learned about. Armenian Cultural and Educational Center in Watertown, Massachusetts was looking to liquidate its collection. In 2014, Janet oversaw another sizable and prominent Armenian donation when Brothers Edward, Jonathan, Norman, and Robert Hogikyan sought a home for their parents’ private library. The Azad and Margaret Hogikyan Armenian Studies Collection consists of some 400 titles, many of which are rare and unique, and resides in a prominently-placed oak case on the main floor of U-M’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library.
A world-class collection is worth very little if the materials themselves are not discoverable in the library catalog. The description of library resources – often simply referred to as cataloging – is a specialized skill, whose complications increase dramatically when dealing with information objects in non-English languages and non-Latin scripts. To help ensure the discoverability and accessibility of our growing Armenian collections, the Library hired Armine Kirakosyan (introduced above) as a full-time cataloger of Armenian and Slavic materials in 2016. Today, Kirakosyan is not just one of the only Armenian cataloging specialists in the country, her expertise is helping to shape the field. Kirakosyan conducted the time- and labor-intensive process of recommending changes to the Library of Congress’s Romanization Table for Armenian. Those changes were adopted in 2022. (Romanization Tables lay out the rules, determined by the Library of Congress, for rendering non-Latin scripts into Latin characters. Also referred to as “transliteration,” such standards are critical because romanized text is the default way to search for non-English resources in Western library systems, which for a very long time could not recognize “foreign” scripts.)
