Tulane's Special Collection's Rare Books Unit houses a collection of rare and beautiful Russian books that is particularly strong in history and travel from the pre-Revolutionary period.
The Russian Collection: A Guide to Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Holdings in the Special Collections Division of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (Farrow 1995)
Transliteration is the process of rendering one alphabet in terms of another. For the transliteration of Russian, there are many schemes available. The most important and commonly seen are the Library of Congress, the International Scholarly system and what many recognize as the common reader's standard: the BGN/PCGN system, jointly developed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and the British Geographic Board.
The Library of Congress system is the most common in use in North American libraries. The LC system usually has diacritics, but is often seen without them. See here for the Library of Congress' Romanization table for Russian.
The International Scholarly System (ISS) is based on the Czech alphabet. Click here for an ISS table. It is often used by linguists and also seen in use by scholarly journals published in the U.S.
BGN/PCGN is perhaps the simplest to read and display. It is frequently seen in popular non-scholarly writing and is not considered appropriate for scholarly use. Simplifications are often seen, for example, converting ë to yo, simplifying -iy and -yy endings to -y, and omitting apostrophes for ъ and ь.
E.g.
Russian Library of Congress I S S BGN/PCGN
Георгий Georgiĭ Georgij Georgi
Достое́вский Dostoevskiĭ Dostoevskij Dostoyevsky
Толстой Tolstoĭ Tolstoj Tolstoy
Ба́бель Babel' Babel' Babel
