Still under development, the University of Minnesota's Early 19th Century Russian Readership & Culture Project (http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/rusread.htm) is one of relatively few comprehensive digital archives for the study of Imperial Russian history. Based on materials gathered over two decades of research that culminated in a dissertation on The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences, 1828-1848, the project is distinctive in a number of ways. First, it pulls together a variety of primary research materials into a single archive. (To some extent this is not uncommon, but the ENCRRC archive includes not only texts, images, and scholarly reference materials, but also a large statistical database of 12,000 subscription records which provide much additional research data). Second, the search mechanism has been customized to provide simultaneous access to both English and Cyrillic TEI-encoded texts without the need for a Cyrillic keyboard--and this in itself is a technical feat. But the project's most distinctive feature is its use of SGML <interp> tags to enrich the texts by encapsulating a number of pre-selected analytical categories. This means that users of the archive are given not one but two modes of access to the content of the four main text groups (fiction, journals, memoirs and travel accounts). How is this achieved? First, researchers are presented with a comprehensive full-text search option, since the project uses Enigma Corporation's powerful SGML-based DynaWeb software to deliver the texts to the web (http://erc.lib.umn.edu/dynaweb/ readers/^@Generic Collection View). Second, the project's adoption of SGML-based analytical tagging means that users have an additional avenue of access to thematic categories. To enable this approach the interface presents a roster of 10 main categories of analysis, each divided into small groups of differing sizes for a total of 60 subcategories. Entries are scripted so that the software can retrieve and display passages that contain superimposed SGML ID references even though the texts are converted to HTML for delivery over the web. Space limitations prevent enumeration of all the subcategories, but a listing of the main themes will give some idea of the research potential involved: Publishing, Print Categories, Novels, Journals, Newspapers, Booktrade, Text Access (Bookstores, Coffeehouses, etc), Reading Publics, Social Groups, and Job Titles. The provision of these categories works well for researchers in differing fields of Russian culture. A literary scholar may use the archive to trace references in the various groups of texts to the distribution of original Russian novels versus translations of foreign compositions; he or she may then enhance these findings by searching the database of subscription records from the period 1825-1846, and reviewing biographic and geographic data about the subscribers connected with both native and translated novels. A history scholar, on the other hand, may use the materials to trace levels of access to print materials among less privileged groups (such as lower-level bueaucrats and merchants) not normally considered part of the contemporary cultural milieu. A women's studies scholar may use the archive to piece together hard-to-find references to women's reading, and the mechanisms women used to gain access to texts in a clearly defined patriarchal society. It should therefore be clear that employment of a relatively simple SGML-based analysis option has enabled substantial enrichment of a carefully-selected core of texts such that they are immediately serviceable for multiple purposes. In addition to the project's value for different fields of study, another important benefit resides, as noted, in its presentation of a rich variety of sources that include encoded images and historical records as well as primary texts. All these resources are related, moreover, by topic. But the linkage between them is not always straightforward, and so it has seemed important to take note of new concepts like SGML Topic Maps (ISO standard 13250, Geneva, December 2000)--which promises to facilitate the linkage of similar elements in different types of research data. As Christian Wittern has suggested ("TEI and Topic Maps," ACH/ALLC 2001), topic maps provide an "architecture for the semantic structuring of information networks…[that] has the potential to provide a bridge between… texts encoded with schemes like the TEI [and] other information resources." More explicitly, Bill Trippe noted recently in an article published in EContent (August 2001, v. 24, issue 6, p. 45ff), "For proponents, topic maps are the ideal solution for helping users find information about a topic across a variety of documents." Wittern also suggests that topic maps enable an archive to present abstract as well as concrete representations of knowledge. Until recently the categories used in the ENCRRC archive were more exclusively objective than the mix of categories used in our better-known sister project, Women's Travel Writing, 1830-1930 (http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/ womtrav.htm), and as such, have been easier to apply. But WTW's two subjective categories--gender and ethnicity--are strongly championed by faculty advisers to the project as essential material for the pursuit of current scholarly trends in women's studies (though certainly more challenging to the encoder). It thus seemed advisable to problematize more fully the analytical tools supplied for the ENCRRC archive. With this in mind, we are redesigning and testing out certain revamped portions of the ENCRRC archive. Drawing on the work of Hans Holger Rath and Steve Pepper (including their "Navigating Haystacks, Discovering Needles," Markup Languages, 1999), we hope to achieve a partial implementation of the topic map standard. We are partially motivated by the hope that this will facilitate an overlay of more provocative, abstract linkages superimposed on our current, largely objective interpretive network. A second goal is to determine whether the presentation of disparate early 19th century Russian history materials in the form of topic maps will make their analysis more convenient and productive for the researcher than their current presentation in separate, though proximate, data groups. But as noted by Trippe, "the proposed standard itself is relatively new… and the commercial technology supporting the standard is still in its early stages." Our second goal is therefore our major concern: to explore how well this concept works in a multi-type archive.