Few scholars have had as much influence on the study of Soviet civil law as Olimpiad S. Ioffe (1920-2005). Born in what is now Ukraine, Ioffe became one of the Soviet Union’s most respected legal scholars, serving for more than two decades as chairman of the Civil Law Department at Leningrad State University before emigrating to the United States. After a fellowship at Harvard Law School, he joined the faculty here at UConn Law, where he continued his scholarship and teaching until his retirement in 1998.[1]

Following his death, his family graciously donated his entire personal library of over one hundred titles to the UConn Law Library. Most are in Russian, but his broad and varied collection includes a smattering of titles in languages such as Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, and Polish. The collection first came into the hands of my former colleague, archivist Lea Wallenius. Lea worked diligently with a Russian-speaking UConn Law student to translate titles and locate Worldcat records for them, but didn’t have time to complete the project before her retirement.

For several years, the books sat on my shelves, looming over me as a reminder of work left undone. At first, I was flummoxed about how to approach the project. Although I took a year of Russian as an undergrad a million years ago, all that remained in my head was how to (slowly) sound out Cyrillic writing. I certainly didn’t have the language skills to translate the dozens of titles awaiting cataloging. The library didn’t have the budget to pay for professional translation of the entire collection, either. What to do?

Enter the hero of the hour: Microsoft Copilot. Although I regard generative AI with a healthy dose of the skepticism one might expect from a professional librarian, I freely admit that Copilot valiantly stepped in to fill the gap between my knowledge and my hope of cataloging Ioffe’s collection.

I took photos of the title pages of the books, uploaded them to Copilot, and it would provide me nearly instantly with a translation, as well as a typed version of the title in Russian so I could easily search Worldcat. I cross-checked enough of the translations with Google Translate to feel reasonably confident in Copilot’s skill in this area.

Even better, Copilot was able to transcribe and translate numerous handwritten inscriptions in the books. This painted a richer picture of the books in Ioffe’s collection; for example, it revealed that many were gifts from the authors to their former professor, demonstrating just how much Ioffe helped shape the study of Soviet civil law.

Thanks to Lea’s groundwork and my collaboration with Copilot, Ioffe’s entire private library is now searchable in the catalog and available to be viewed in the law library’s Special Collections. To make an appointment to view Special Collections material, please contact the library at lawlibrary@uconn.edu, call (860) 570-5200, or feel free to stop by the front desk to enquire in person. A catalog of the collection is available and searchable at https://uconn-law.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01UCT_LAW:01UCT_LAW&collectionId=81155247660002433&lang=en

Written by Susanna French, Metadata and E-Resource Management Librarian

[1] https://www.courant.com/obituaries/olimpiad-solomonovich-ioffe-hartford-farmington-ct/