Forum for Classics, Libraries and Scholarly Communication
Meeting of January 6, 2007, San Diego, California
Present: S. Choudhury (Johns Hopkins University, sayeed@jhu.edu), G. Crane (Tufts
University, gregory.crane@tufts.edu), P. Graham (UC Davis, pagraham@ucdavis.edu), G.
Heverly (New York University, gerald.heverly@nyu.edu), C. Jones (ASCSA, cejones@ascsa.edu.gr), R. Lindau, Chair, (Princeton University, rlindau@princeton.edu), C.
MacKay (Bryn Mawr, cmackay@brynmawr.edu), C. Mardikes (University of Chicago, cmardikes@uchicago.edu), R. Arvid Nelsen (UC San Diego, ranelsen@ucsd.edu), G.
Paganelis (California State University Sacramento, paganelis@csus.edu), D. Sullivan,
Secretary (UC Berkeley, dsulliva@library.berkeley.edu), Yang Wang (Princeton
University, yangwang@princeton.edu), T. Temple Wright (Center for Hellenic Studies,
Harvard University, ttwright@chs.harvard.edu)
1. Elections
In elections for the coming two year period, Heverly was elected Chair and Sullivan was
chosen as Secretary.
2. Center for Hellenic Studies
Temple Wright, Librarian for Acquisitions, Reference and Visitor Relations, introduced
the Center’s programs and activities. Founded in 1961, its mission is to “rediscover
humanism.” It has both educational and research components, hosting seminars, concerts
and symposia, research fellows, and publishes works in print and online, aiming at the
broadest possible audience. The library, of 57,000 volumes, has been built on the nucleus
of Werner Jaeger’s personal collection, and is now moving beyond its original focus on
Hellenic philology to include collections supporting research in Roman studies, art
history, and other aspects of classical antiquity.
3. Consortium of Hellenic Studies Librarians (CoHSL)
Paganelis and Lindau reported on the meeting of this group held at the Gennadius Library
in Athens in December 2006. For details on the Consortium, see
http://www.princeton.edu/~rlindau/CoHSL.htm
Represented at the meeting were American and Greek research libraries, the ASCSA, and
CRL. Along with tours of various libraries in Athens, the conference focused on
achieving better bibliographic control of Greek language materials, digitization projects
in Greece, ways to achieve better resource sharing to build collections in Hellenic studies,
and a project to index periodicals concerning post-Byzantine Hellenic culture, which
Paganelis leads. The conference revealed many stand-alone digitization projects at
academic libraries and research institutions in Greece; one fruitful outcome may be that
Greek and American libraries will join forces more effectively to make these accessible.
CRL has expressed interest in digitizing the microfilmed holdings of Greek newspapers
dating from the 19th century onwards held by the Boule library. Mardikes suggested that
the Forum might help by dividing up efforts among its members to catalog digital
resources being created in Greece. She will investigate and report at the next meeting.
[Note: Rhea Karabelas Lesage has since published an overview of the Athens meeting,
"The Modern Greek Resources Project Meeting: A Preliminary Report," Bulletin of the
Modern Greek Studies Association, vol. XXXVIII, p. 48-52.]
4. Open Content Alliance
Choudhury gave background on the Open Content Alliance. Originating from a proposal
by Brewster Kahle to digitize 100 million public domain books and once supported by
Microsoft and Yahoo, the Alliance is now independent of commercial sponsorship and
oriented towards cooperation with scholars and librarians to determine which materials
should be scanned first. The Sloan Foundation has provided funding for scanning based
on the collections of Johns Hopkins. Hopkins is collaborating with OCLS to produce
records for scanned texts. Heverly praised the idea of using experts—scholars and
librarians—to determine which texts should be scanned (as opposed to the “wall-to-wall”
approach of Google), and suggested the Forum could play a role in helping set OCA’s
priorities. Choudhury agreed that the Forum could be of assistance in matching supply
and demand for their digital projects.
5. Perseus Project
Crane reported that Perseus has adopted a Common Content license for all its public
domain content. The project has a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in three
subject areas: Classics, the early modern period, and English studies. They will be
exploring how to turn imaged pages into searchable text, automated translation, and how
to turn unstructured text into data. He gave as an example of the latter the need to code
texts in a way that would distinguish like-named entities such as the Salamis in Cyprus
from the Salamis near Athens. The project is also working on creating a FRBR-ized
catalog of the source texts in their collection.
6. APA projects
Heverly reported on two topics:
During the past year, the APA solicited input from the Forum on the servicing of
subscriptions to both the hard copy and the online version of L’Année philologique. The
APA has also signalled support for the Forum’s suggestion to appoint a working group of
its members to study the online L’Année interface and recommend improvements.
Sullivan volunteered to lead this group; its other members are: MacKay, Mardikes,
Paganelis, Wang, and Karen Green, who could not attend.
The NEH has made a challenge grant to the APA in the amount of $650,000 dollars to
support a new American Center for Classics Research and Teaching, one of whose chief
activities will be the continuing operation of the American office of L’Année. The APA
must raise $2.6 million in order to receive the full challenge grant. Heverly will
distribute the APA case statement to members of the Forum and asked everyone to
review it and to assist in identifying potential donors through their own contacts with
their departments, individuals, foundations, and companies in the business of scholarly
publishing and the book trade. (All suggestions for donor prospects should be sent to:
gerald.heverly@nyu.edu ).
7. Finding Aid for the archives of classical scholars
The group discussed both the current online incarnation of this project:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~rlindau/classicalscholars/index2.php
and the project itself.
Some felt that the current design, as a stand-alone database, will tend to hide the
information it might eventually contain from search engines such as Google and also
asked whether a wiki might be a better tool for organizing a collaborative project on this
scale.
The question was also raised whether the project was itself redundant, as it ultimately
relies on existing access to archives through such general databases as Archives USA and
ArchivesGrid.
8. APA Task Force on Electronic Publishing
Mardikes, who serves on the task force, reported.
Plans are underway to digitize the set of microfiche produced by the APA in the 1980s
and have the resulting files mounted in an Open Access archive.
The task force will also recommend establishing a separate editorial board for a series of
scholarly monographs to be published primarily in electronic form. The task force’s final
report can be read at:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/taskforce/APAAIATaskForce.html