Sharing AWDL Records Across Institutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone increasingly aware of access to digital research materials. Never has this been more important to own user community at ISAW or to other libraries and institutions that serve the wider academic and scholarly community. For this reason, the ISAW Library has worked during the pandemic to clean up the metadata describing items in the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL), so that the bibliographic records can be shared and the items in AWDL be made more discoverable and accessible to the wider scholarly public.

Over the last year the ISAW Library has received several requests from various domestic and international libraries, asking that we share metadata for AWDL. Sharing this metadata with other libraries enables materials in AWDL to be searchable and findable in the catalogs of other institutions. Gabriel Mckee and Jasmine Smith of the ISAW Library have been working closely with colleagues in the NYU Division of Libraries, Metadata Librarian Alexandra Provo and Workflow Automation Analyst JooHwi Kim, to make the catalog records and title lists available. Our MARC records can be accessed via OCLC WorldShare by institutions who have a WorldShare account.

We are also committed to making metadata available to institutions not affiliated with OCLC: NISO KBART title lists are available to anyone or any institution upon request. These title lists include basic metadata and a stable link to the digital item. In the near future, we hope to make these records and metadata files available to the public on a Github repository -- stay tuned! 

Finally, a policy for the sharing of records for all open access NYU digital library collections is currently in development. 

For any inquiries related to acquiring records from the Ancient World Digital Library, please email ISAW-Library@nyu.edu. For questions about the records for other NYU digital collections, please email Alex Provo.