A year of projects from philologists: ProDetLit (short for About Children Literature)

A year ago, when we were all just starting our lives in Zoom, MsTeams and other wonderful virtual places, it seemed as if one of our biggest problems was organising practical tasks and projects. However, what we feared did not come true: on the contrary, it turned out that the virtual world is simply waiting to be conquered by philologists.

The"Philology" program has experienced a true year of projects in 2020-2021: philologists from Nizhny Novgorod's HSE have created their own educational project "Lestnica" ("the Stairs") (you can read more about it here), developed a course of literature for “Shkola 800” ("School 800"), joined the PROZHITO ("Lived Through") project, prepared digital catalogues for the largest Russian-speaking digital library InWerden, created a number of multimedia museum apps as part of the “Prostranstvo souchastiya” ("Collaboration space") project, prepared and held “Totalny diktant” (“Total Dictation”). Today we will only focus on the ProDetLit project, but we would like to ask you to remain in touch with us – there are plenty of interesting things ahead, and it's clear future philologists will not be left unemployed!

ProDetLit is a collaborative project by the Russian State Children Library and Association of Workers of Culture, Art, and Education for Encouraging Children to Read “Rastim chitatelya” (“We Are Raising a Reader”). It is a constantly growing database containing information on authors of children's literature and institutions that are connected to it (publishers, journals, literary awards, competitions).

ProDetLit essentially combines elements of a digital encyclopedia and a bibliographic database, equipped with a multilayered search engine and a navigation service, which allows  users to have direct access to open information resources on the internet, as well as digital libraries. Eleven students in their fourth year of college took part in the project. They were tasked with preparing an encyclopedic page on two authors and providing a bibliographic description for them. Such a task requires, on the one hand, responsibility and professionalism (since these materials will then by used by a multitude of readers), and on the other hand, a touch of creativity – it is important to write about an author in such a way so as to make others interested in his books. The students dealt with the project successfully, 25 articles about authors prepared by the students have been published on the website, and the grant system has allowed the students to be rewarded financially for their work.

Senior students of the "Philology" program sharing their experiences taking part in the project:

Anna Bykova: “Participation in the project ProDetLit gave me many opportunities. I realised that I am able to search for information, edit texts and, most importantly, create them. It was sometimes difficult to find material related to the life and creations of an artist, but that only reinforced my desire to search for more. I really liked working on the bibliography, however stange that might sound. Formatting the first 2-3 books and articles was mind-bending, but after that I got used to it, and things picked up from there.

Yekaterina Mikulyayeva: "It was really dreadful at first to work with the library catalogues, as they are essentially a large array of data. However, as you keep working, you get used to it, and the amount of punctuation in the library lists stops bothering you. This was the first time in my life that I have worked with digital catalogues of not only Russian, but also foreign libraries. Of course, we really honed our paraphrasing skills in the process! Now I can tell my friends that my materials have been published in encyclopedias!”

Lada Zotova: "For me personally, taking part in ProDetLit has been a fruitful experience. Thanks to creating materials for this resource, I was not only able to get acquainted with with the biographies of famous illustrators and writers of children's books, who created the characters of “Yabeda-Koryabeda” (“Tattletale”) (A. I. Semyonov) and “Hedgehog in the Fog” (S. G. Kozlov), but also get fairly accustomed to the functions of the website for The Russian State Children Library and The National Children Electronic library, get a deeper understanding of the features of how children literature functions.

Polina Surakhidze: "ProDetLit reminded me of my favourite authors from my childhood: Astrid Lindgren, Robert Lewis Stevenson. I suddenly realised that I might be interested in them even nowadays. The project was very well-designed and useful, it was nice to be a part of it! I would like to thank the Russian State Children Library employees for this opportunity!"

The philologists' participation in ProDetLit was valuable experience of working with a massive project. It is great that it gave them the opportunity to apply their skills of creating informative, objective and useful texts. And therefore, made the virtual world a little better!

The material was prepared by Olga Suslova, a senior student of the "Philology" program.