FCLSC Jan 4 2014
Catherine Mardikes, University of Chicago; Camilla MacKay, Bryn Mawr College; Jeremy Ott,
American School of Classical Studies at Athens; Jennifer Pavelko, Brill; Max Goldman,
Vanderbilt; Colin McCaffrey, Yale; Lucie Stylianopoulos, University of Virginia; Lanah Koelle,
Center for Hellenic Studies; Shiela Winchester, University of Texas-Austin; Lenny Muellner,
Center for Hellenic Studies; Gregory Crane, Tufts/Leipzig; Chuck Jones, Penn State/Ancient
World Online; Temple Wright, Center for Hellenic Studies; Jacquie Riley, University of
Cincinnati; Kenny Morrell, Center for Hellenic Studies
Lucie Stylianopoulos introduced the features of the Wordpress website hosted at the CHS:
www.classicslibrarians.org. Suggestions for additions include links to open digital editions of
classics (Gregory Crane) and implementing the tagging feature (Catherine Mardikes).
Kenny Morrell and Lanah Koelle reported on the summer program in information fluency for
classics undergraduates at the CHS. The first session was held in summer 2013 and was
coordinated by Phoebe Acheson. The curriculum included field trips to the National Archives,
LC, sessions on libraries, citations, classics resources, WordPress. The 2014 session (July 8-17)
is now being advertised with an application deadline of April 30:
http://wp.chs.harvard.edu/sunoikisis/2013/12/17/2014-information-fluency-workshop/. Gregory
Crane suggested a related program in Leipzig.
Catherine Mardikes and Colin McCaffrey introduced a project to cooperatively list classics titles
in Italian and German sold by Harrassowitz and Casalini that were not purchased by any US
libraries. Catherine provides the following summary:
"The project is being jointly sponsored by WESS CMR (ALA) and the FCLSC. Though there
was some discussion about a medieval component, we plan to start with Classics and Classical
Archaeology only.
Initially we are working with two vendors, Harrassowitz and Casalini Libri. From each vendor
we will acquire a list of titles that have not been purchased by a lending academic library in the
US within the last two years from current imprint date. So, in 2014, we will see titles from 2012.
Even though we just hit 2014, we think a 2011 title list is still a good place to start, as a sort of
test case.
We are planning to put the titles up in a secure Google spreadsheet so that classics librarians can
choose titles from the list to order. Once they’ve selected the titles in the vendor’s database, they
can insert their institution’s name in the institution field.
There are a few issues that might make this less simple. By lending library, we hope to exclude
Library of Congress and a number of the art/museum libraries which rarely lend items. Also, we
would like to consider records for paperback and hardbound books as one title. If an institution
has purchased an e-version, however, we would still like the print title included. Neither vendor
has provided the lists yet, so the number of titles is not yet known. This may be expanded to
French with the merger of Aux Amateurs and Touzot, and to Spanish titles."
There was a discussion about the particular need for knowledge of Greek books, and
encouraging Casalini to include these titles in their database so that Greek titles could also be
considered.
OA digital editions of Greek (and Latin): Lucie Stylianopoulos brought up the TLG and UVa's
refusal to agree to the terms of the TLG license (and thus lack of access to TLG for UVa
community members) as a prelude to discussion of open alternatives to the TLG.
Gregory Crane is working on making available Greek and Latin texts (summary from Jan. 2014):
"The Open Greek and Latin Project proposes to provide an extensive foundation for Open
Access and Open Data research in the study of Greek and Latin, creating a collection, available
under a CC-BY-SA license, of works produced from the Homeric epics in the mid-eighth
century BCE through the 20th century CE and including content from public domain editions
(including editions published as late as 1991 in 2017 under German law). Building directly upon
more than 25 years of continuous research and development by the Perseus Digital Library and
upon recent breakthrough work on OCR for Classical Greek, Open Greek and Latin proposes a
new collection with the following layers: (1) c. 3 billion words of Greek and Latin from public
domain books with library metadata generated by OCR optimized for those languages; (2) c. 1
billion words of Greek and Latin with reasonable metadata for composition date and/or of
reasonably datable text; (3) 500 million words of text with metadata identifying where a FRBR
work appears in the pages within one or more printed books and including multiple editions of
every major Classical Greek and Latin source; (4) 200 million words of corrected OCR source
texts, evenly divided between materials produced through 600 CE and post-classical sources,
including corrected transcriptions of the textual notes as well as level 3 TEI XML encoding with
at least one established citation scheme for the reconstructed text; (5) automatically generated
metadata for all texts and curated metadata for as much of the collection as possible (including
classification and identification of named entities, textual variants and manuscript witnesses,
lemmatization and morpho-syntactic analysis, identification of text reuse). Preliminary work
conducted in the United States from 1987 to the present and at the University of Leipzig during
2013 and 2014 has laid the foundations for each component of this work. The current proposal
requests support for an initial three-year period so as to accomplish the first half of this work."
(See also http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2013/04/04/the-open-philology-project-andhumboldt-chair-of-digital-humanities-at-leipzig/).
A particular concern is different copyright laws in Europe, and the US. Hathitrust books are only
available in Europe for imprints before 1872 (compared to 1923 in the US). European copyright
holds for life of the author plus 70 years, but in Germany, editions can only be copyrighted for
publication plus 25 years (and in Europe in general plus 30 years). Commentary falls under
regular life plus 70. The project will focus on making at least one full publicly accessible edition
of each text (and making available pre-1923 texts in Europe). Bruce Robertson and Federico
Boschetti are working on OCR for Greek texts; see
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2013-07br.html.
It was agreed that the FCLSC formally support this project.
Lucie Stylianopoulos reported briefly on her discussions with Deb Brown at Dumbarton Oaks
about sponsoring a project at the APA/AIA in New Orleans (2015) on linked data or big data,
which was supported by the members present.