ISAW Library Announces the launch of the Digital South Caucasus Collection
The Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World announces the beta release of the Digital South Caucasus Collection.
The Digital South Caucasus Collection (DSCC) preserves and provides open access to historical, archaeological, and ethnographic scholarship on the ancient South Caucasus, a region that today roughly coincides with the geographical boundaries of the three countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
The South Caucasus region with select archaeological sites. Fig. 1 from Herrscher et al. (2018). “Dietary inferences through stable isotope analysis at the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the southern Caucasus (sixth to first millennium BC, Azerbaijan): From environmental adaptation to social impacts.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 167. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23718.
The DSCC is a collaboration between the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University (NYU) and two archaeological institutes in Georgia and Armenia, the Georgian National Museum and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. In future phases the DSCC hopes to expand to include partners in Azerbaijan as well. The DSCC Discovery Portal is available as a beta release and open for public feedback.
The beta release can be found online at https://dscc.its.nyu.edu/.
The ancient South Caucasus is a complex region of great historical importance from the Bronze age to late antiquity, for which there is a significant amount of high-quality scholarship available from the late 19th and 20th centuries. Most of this scholarship is not in English, and for various reasons, very little of it can be found today in library collections outside the region. However, there now exists a tight-knit, international community of scholars and institutions, with deep ties across the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani academies, responsible for most of the publications and interested in making their scholarship more widely available both within their respective academies and to the international scholarly and general public. As part of its mission to support research across the interconnected ancient world and its commitment to international collaboration, the ISAW Library has partnered with this academic community and these national academies to help realize this potential in the form of an open-access digital library using state-of-the-art technology and best practices in metadata curation and publication.
In the first phase of development (2021–2024), the DSCC digitized scholarly materials published by the Georgian National Museum (GNM) and its Soviet predecessor institutions. It also completed the technical development of the underlying digital infrastructure for the digital library. This phase was funded in part by a grant from the US Embassy in Tbilisi (Cultural and Educational Small Grants Program), which helped to defray the digitization of 39,483 pages of scholarly materials published by the GNM and its predecessor institutions, while ISAW/NYU took responsibility for the technical development of the digital infrastructure and portal of the digital library. ISAW is already laying the foundation with its partners in following phases to expand the digitization program to Armenian and Azerbaijani archaeological and historical institutes; optimize the ingest of born-digital materials and organize a pipeline for ongoing accession of current scholarship; enhance multiple-language metadata recording, cataloging, and indexing; implement multiple-language OCR; refine the DSCC Discovery Portal on the basis of stakeholder and community input; and help foster community awareness and participation in this digital library.
The ISAW Library would like to recognize the work of Dr. Patrick J. Burns (ISAW Library), Dr. Karen Rubinson (ISAW), Dr. Giorgi Bedianashvili (Institute of Archaeology, Georgian National Museum), Dr. David Lordkipanidze (Director, Georgian National Museum), Ana Tskhvedadze, Jasmine Smith, Christian Casey, and the Society of Young Archaeologists of Georgia, all of whom made significant contributions to the realization of this project.
The DSCC is a collection in the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL), an umbrella project of the ISAW Library. AWDL’s mission is to identify, collect, curate, and provide access to a broad range of scholarly materials relevant to the study of the ancient world.
If you are an author or publisher who would like to partner with the ISAW Library by adding to the DSCC, or have any questions or comments, please email ISAW-Library@nyu.edu