Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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audience. Expand<strong>in</strong>g the opportunities of collaboration beyond scholars to the <strong>in</strong>terested public was
considered as important by a variety of projects.
While this section has largely focused on access <strong>in</strong> terms of digital scholarship and content that is
freely available, another key component of access is the ability to f<strong>in</strong>d such materials <strong>in</strong> the first place.
The nature of open-access digital collections <strong>in</strong> classics and the challenges of catalog<strong>in</strong>g and collect<strong>in</strong>g
them has been addressed by Chuck Jones, director of the library at ISAW. 610 As his charge at ISAW is
to “develop a library of the scholarly resources required to support a research and teach<strong>in</strong>g program
cover<strong>in</strong>g the ancient world from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific and from the emergence of
civilized life until Late Antiquity,” he quickly realized that such a collection would have to be both
physical and digital and that the digital component of the ISAW library would ultimately <strong>in</strong>clude
resources developed both locally and elsewhere (Jones 2010). The ISAW is also seek<strong>in</strong>g to develop a
project they are call<strong>in</strong>g the “Ancient World Digital Library” to <strong>in</strong>tegrate po<strong>in</strong>ts of access and discovery
to materials with<strong>in</strong> tools scholars already use. 611
As chief editor of the Abzu 612 bibliography (started <strong>in</strong> 1994 and now part of ETANA), Jones described
the chang<strong>in</strong>g nature of his catalog<strong>in</strong>g work, from almost anyth<strong>in</strong>g he could f<strong>in</strong>d to conscious collection
mak<strong>in</strong>g. Whereas once he also focused on <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g access to commercially licensed materials, he
found that research library f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g tools covered this area well. At the same time, he realized that “it
was equally evident that the research library community was not yet com<strong>in</strong>g to grips with provid<strong>in</strong>g
suitable access to born-digital and open access digital publication which is freely distributed, requir<strong>in</strong>g
neither purchase nor license”(Jones 2010). So as the work of Abzu cont<strong>in</strong>ued, Jones decided to create
the blog “the Ancient World Onl<strong>in</strong>e” 613 as a means of provid<strong>in</strong>g even faster access to new open-access
publications on the Ancient World. While Jones had orig<strong>in</strong>ally blogged solely under the larger Ancient
World Bloggers Group, 614 he found that the sheer volume of resources available onl<strong>in</strong>e necessitated
the development of his own blog specifically dedicated to open-access sources about the Ancient
World. For example, Jones ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>s an alphabetical list 615 of open-access journals <strong>in</strong> Ancient Studies
that currently has more than 600 titles. 616 This list also demonstrates that the idea of provid<strong>in</strong>g open
access to scholarship is steadily ga<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g acceptance with<strong>in</strong> the classical community.
A detailed analysis of the history and results of one of these open-access journals (Frankfurter
elektronische Rundschau zur Altertumskunde [feRA]) has been explored <strong>in</strong> a recent Archaeolog blog
post by Stefan Krmnicek and Peter Probst (Krmnicek and Probst 2010). 617 They expla<strong>in</strong>ed that FeRA
was created <strong>in</strong> 2006 and was <strong>in</strong>tended as an onl<strong>in</strong>e forum for young scholars <strong>in</strong> archaeology from all
over the world to publish their work. FeRA is published three times a year and has <strong>in</strong>cluded 36
contributions <strong>in</strong> German, English, and Italian. In analyz<strong>in</strong>g their log files, they noted that only about 14
percent of their visits orig<strong>in</strong>ated from academic networks, and while they acknowledged that many
academics might utilize commercial ISPs to access FeRA, they believed these results suggested that “a
fairly large group of people <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> the very specialized field of classical studies exists outside
610 http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/
611 In March 2011, an <strong>in</strong>itial book view<strong>in</strong>g application for the Ancient World Digital Library was announced on the Ancient World onl<strong>in</strong>e blog
(http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/).
612 http://www.etana.org/abzu/
613 http://ancientworldonl<strong>in</strong>e.blogspot.com/
614 http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/
615 http://ancientworldonl<strong>in</strong>e.blogspot.com/2009/10/alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html
616 This list also illustrates the importance of provid<strong>in</strong>g such a collection service for when search<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
(http://www.doaj.org/), various keyword searches <strong>in</strong> November 2010 (ancient [6 journals]), antiquity [9 journals], classics [6]), classical [14]) turned up
only 24 unique classics journals, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g three of the most prom<strong>in</strong>ent, Didaskalia (http://www.didaskalia.net/journal.html), Electronic Antiquity
(http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/) and Leeds International Classical Studies (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics/).
617 http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2010/05/open_access_classical_studies.html