New ISAW Library Titles: August 2016
A list of books added to the ISAW Library in August 2016 is now available online on the ISAW Library website. The titles are sorted in the website version according to thematic topics (e.g., "East Asia" and "Ancient Near East & Asia Minor"); and within each topic, the titles are organized according to Library of Congress classification. The authors and titles of works in non-Roman languages are given in their original script. This list is also available in a Zotero library and as a browsable map (see below for more information).
August was an active month for acquisitions, with 409 new items added to the collection. Among these were back runs of journals like Analecta papyrologica (Oak Collection PA3339 .A55), Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie (Large Collection DS56 .Z45), and Le journal des médecines cunéiformes (Oak Collection R135 .J68) and full runs of multi-volume works like the Belles Lettres edition of Pliny the Elder's Histoire naturelle (Small Collection PA6613 .F8 1947) and the Facsimile edition of the Nag Hammadi codices (Oversize Collection PJ2199 .C5 1972). Important work by members of the ISAW community was also published and cataloged in August, including Archaeology of Anatolia: recent discoveries (2011-2014) (Small Collection DS155 .A73 2015), which contains a report on the excavations at Kınık Höyük, Nigde, Turkey led by Prof. Lorenzo d'Alfonso, and a special issue of the journal Almagest devoted to the Inscriptions of the Antikythera Mechanism (Small Collection QB85 .I57 2016), with contributions by ISAW's Interim Director Prof. Alexander Jones.
The August New Titles list also marks an important new development in access to our library's holdings. In addition to the text-based list of titles and the taggable, searchable Zotero library, we have created a browsable map of this month's acquisitions using Google Fusion Tables. [Update, February 2021: Our new map interface is now live. The August 2016 data has not yet been added to this map, but the most recent month is available here.] Each point on this map represents a title in the library collection, and contains bibliographical information as well as links into the NYU library catalog and, where applicable, to the page for that place in the open-source online gazeteer Pleiades.
This month's map represents a big leap forward in the geographic representation of our collection, but it is merely a proof-of-concept for our larger plans to map the library collection using linked data. The coming months will see new iterations of this kind of map, which we hope to make more precise and accurate in future months. The ISAW Library team is at work on a map built in a different platform that will encode more information into the representation of each title, make more extensive use of linked data, and contain enhanced functionality. We are also working to automate the collection of bibliographic/geospatial data represented in the map, which will enable us to scale it up to show a greater number of titles. Ultimately, we hope to provide access to as much of the ISAW Library collection as possible through this kind of geographic interface. For more information on the ISAW Library's vision for the geographic representation of library data, see last week's blog post on our use of Pleiades data in cataloging, and stay tuned to this blog for future developments.