FCLSC meeting Seattle 2013
Catherine Mardikes, Chair
Rhea Lesage filling in as secretary for David Jenkins
Publisher visitors: Ebsco, Brill, DeGruyter
1. 2013 Elections: Lucie Wall Stylianopoulos, Chair; Camilla MacKay, Secretary.
2. Announcements:
 The Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) will be hosting FCLC’s web site. (Word
Press)

Deb Stewart and Lucie’s panel, “Managing Archaeological Data in the Digital
Age” is Sun. AM 8:30-11:30:

David Sullivan: Project to document the archives of American Classicists and
Classical Archaeologists. This project was initiated by Rebecka Lindau
several years back, but put on hold. Do we want to get this project rolling
again? First question is, is this project still of interest, or is it redundant?
Answer: It is not redundant. Many of these archives are unpublished and
unknown. If yes, what form will it take? Who will do the work? It needs to be
organized—who gets it started and who will host it? New technologies will
make it easier for us to move forward on this. It was agreed that a subgroup
would meet after the FSCLC meeting to discuss further. (See notes below)
3. Report: “Librarianship in Transition: A Day of Conversations,” November, 2012 at
the Center for Hellenic Studies. Temple Wright, Librarian for Acquisitions,
Reference, and Visitor Relations. Temple Wright reported on on a meeting of a
number of classicists at CHS on Nov. 9th. Described the 4 panel discussions, each
panel began with a question. Minutes will be shared with the Forum. CHS meeting
was meant to be a starting point for a much larger discussion.
4a. L’Année Philologique now available on EBSCOhost. Tony Larsen from EBSCO
presented. Will be available mid-late January. EBSCOhost is the interface/platform.
They are partnering with publisher. This will offer a number of enhanced searching
capabilities. The database has content in many languages-the interface can be
changed to various languages. Switch-over is “on the fly” helpful to international
visiting scholars. Still in beta-can sign up for trial-get it up and running. Works well
with the Ebsco Discovery Service (Primo counterpart). Ebsco is leasing the data
from L’Année Philologique so the 2 will coexist. Ebsco’s goal is to make this a unique
searching experience. They are looking for feedback on their platform.
L’Année is not willing to index born-digital items. If Ebsco could push L’Année index
open source items, that would be great. “Smart linking” searching L’Année will cross
databases to find full-text for researchers. Would link to Hathi Trust and Google
books-this is through the Ebsco Discovery Service.
4b. Other Developments concerning L’Année philologique, reported by Jacquelene
W. Riley, University of Cincinnati. Jacquie distributed Eric Rebillard’s update
concerning L’Année.
 L'Année is now indexed by three web scale discovery services (Primo,
Summon, WorldCat local)
 L'Année is now also available on the EBSCOhost platform
 L'Année continues to be available on www.anneephilologique.com (distributed by Les Belles Lettres); recent enhancements
include:
 new, powerful full text search features: searches by phrases (between
double quotes), fuzzy searches, proximity searches; two Wildcards
("?" for a single character wildcard; "*" for a multiple character
wildcard).
 faceted searches (implemented first quarter of 2013)
 OpenURL links for citations of ancient texts
 quarterly updates
We should contact our systems folks to be sure that L’Année is included in our
discovery services.
5. Discussion Topic: “Electronic Books” Why don’t we buy them and why do we do
and the consequences thereof.
Chicago: Faculty prefers electronic for journals, reference works (i.e. Oxford
Classical Dictionary), collections of essays, and handbooks.
Colin: Distrust for unreliable systems. When electronic versions are not working,
patrons get very upset. There is resistance because of problems with accessibility.
Question specific electronic books—endnotes that are not hyper-linked or at least
converted to footnotes are infuriating. Problem then is usability. This should not be
the case. Navigating through an e-book is difficult.
Virginia has a mandate to purchase electronic if available. Now they are facing the
problem that these are more expensive. They are caught in a vise of having to
purchase large packages as well.
UNC has set up recommendations for electronic resources and platforms. Colin will
follow-up with this.
There was concern about the lag time between print and the availability of the
electronic version. Brill is now working on making electronic versions available at
the time of print publications and the pricing is the same. They have packages
available, titles can be bought individually, but soon articles, book chapters will be
available. Bibliographies, citations, will have print as long as the customer demands
it.
Problem some publishers are not letting libraries know whether an item will be
available in electronic form. Question-has anyone used JSTOR e-books? No one here
has.
Catherine described her thought process for purchasing the more esoteric items.
She thinks about purchasing the item that no other U.S. library has so that it can be
available for ILL. How can this continue in a digital world. The question is how to
manage digital rights. Can you give a temporary license? Lending e-books through
ILL.
PDA: Coutts does have an ILL component, but this is more expensive.
Building our future collecting on the notion that ILL will reign may be a problem in
the future. Colin thinks that Brill does allow for ILL of electronic, but not sure about
the delivery.
Brill: Helping journals move from subscription based to open access. They have
gotten a grant to try this. Authors and institutions will pay for their articles to be
published. Brill gets a license to publish.
The data shows that providing open access increases readership. Smaller
institutions are pushing back and resisting this. They think open-access=poorer
quality, or paying for publication=vanity press. There seems to be a total lack of
understanding of this financial model.
The tenure process needs to be changed. Directory of Open Access Journals is very
selective. Any journal that is not publishing in a completely print way they are not
accepted.
Neil Coffee SUNY Buffalo, Digital Classics. Working with Gregory Crane. They are
now affiliated with APA. Digital technology allows for a kind of lingua franca of the
research enterprise.
Lucie: Digital Classics group should join us in Chicago. Catherine suggested hosting a
reception for us in Chicago. YES!
Post-meeting to discuss the Archives of Classical Scholars project.
Present: Catherine Mardikes, Jacquie Riley, Chuck Jones, David Sullivan, Temple
Wright, Colin McCaffrey, Rhea Lesage. Professor Larissa Bonafante (NYU) joined in
the discussion.
Rebecka Lindau originally proposed this project several years ago. Larissa reminded
us that the original goal of the FCLSC was to create a forum for collaboration
between classicists and librarians, and this project is one of those opportunities.
Classicists will provide the information and we librarians will do what we do best:
locate it, organize it and make it accessible, using new technologies.
There is a considerable body of literature on refugee scholars. The original proposal
seems to have been limited to “refugee classicists.” This category might be a good
place for us to start. Larissa will provide a list of names and we will begin populating
the document.
Suggestions:
 Archivists who are custodians of these collections should be involved in the
project.

Start simple: Use the Forum’s page (which will be a Wiki) where we can all
contribute to content.

Chuck suggested that we create Wikipedia entries for this. All agreed that this
is a great idea! We can also update articles already in Wikipedia with
archival information. We can post these in the Forum Wiki.
Question about Werner Jeager’s papers. His library is at the Center for Hellenic
Studies, but are his papers at Harvard? (Rhea’s follow up-yes, they are at the
Houghton Libraryhttp://hollis.harvard.edu/?itemid=|library/m/aleph|002289858)