American Studies in Papyrology now available in the Ancient World Digital Library

By David Ratzan
09/30/2015

The ISAW Library and NYU's Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS) are pleased to announce that they have partnered with the American Society of Papyrologists (ASP) to digitize and publish American Studies in Papyrology, the ASP's scholarly monographic series, on the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL). An initial selection of fifteen volumes were published this week, with more volumes to follow later this year. 

Founded in 1961 to further the study of ancient Greek and Latin papyri, the ASP supports and encourages research and teaching in the field of papyrology, as well as international cooperation among scholars.
 The society thus saw the opportunity to fulfill both aspects of its mission by partnering with ISAW to publish the backlist of American Studies in Papyrology up to volume 48 on AWDL. 

AWDL, which was redesigned and relaunched this past spring, collects, curates, and sustains a digital collection of important research materials for the use of both the NYU and the general scholarly community, with a special focus on the cross-boundary and interdisciplinary research from the Mediterranean to Northern China pursued at ISAW. Besides its specific curatorial focus, AWDL also distinguishes itself from similar digital publishing projects by actively seeking to partner with scholars, institutions, and publishers in order to collect and serve digitized content that is either still in-print or under copyright, in addition to older material no longer under copyright. The present partnership with the ASP and its authors, all of whom approved of their work being published on AWDL, is a perfect example of the sort of cooperation and commitment to increasing access to scholarship that both the ASP and ISAW seek to promote. According to Prof. Jennifer Sheridan Moss, President of the ASP:

The field of papyrology has always blazed trails in digital access. Already in the 1980s scholars could search papyrus texts in the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri; later digitization projects added images of the papyri and their metadata, such as date and provenance. The next logical step is to add the commentaries that analyze the texts. Both I, as an author, and we, as a Society, are very pleased to be in the vanguard of scholars to allow the linking of our texts to their commentaries. The growth of so much digital material, including monographs that are crucial to the study of papyri, will facilitate scholarship for those who lack physical access to this highly specialized collection of books.

Each digital object published on AWDL has a unique, persistent URL, may be downloaded as a PDF, and has been cataloged with high-quality MARC records, so that it is discoverable from both Bobcat (NYU’s Library catalog) and WorldCat. The current ASP volumes have already been linked to the authoritative online checklist of editions maintained on papyri.info, thanks to the team at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3).

For more information about AWDL, please write to David M. Ratzan, the ISAW Head Librarian, at . Updates about new AWDL features and content are announced on the ISAW Library Blog, and we invite you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.