Digital Central Asian Archaeology Library

This article by David M. Ratzan first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 24, Spring 2019.

One of our most exciting recent achievements of the ISAW library team has been the launch of the Digital Central Asian Archaeology collection (DCAA), the newest addition to the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL). The DCAA contains 977 downloadable publications on the history and archaeology of Central Asia. This project originated in the work of the SilkRoDE Digital Library between 2004 and 2005. With contributions from the International Institute of Central Asian Studies, the Italo-Uzbek Archaeological Mission in the Middle Zerafshan Valley, the Institut Français d’Études sur l’Asie Centrale, the Institute of Archaeology of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, the UNESCO Tashkent Field Office, and several other international archaeological missions, SilkRoDE succeeded in digitizing a wealth of Soviet-era scholarship on Central Asia — some of which was originally published in editions of as few as 50 copies!

In collaboration with the principals of the SilkRoDE project, the ISAW Library began development of the DCAA in 2016 as the permanent institutional home for these items. This involved tracing and clearing complicated international rights and devising innovative solutions for preserving and making this material accessible and discoverable online. A key requirement was to develop the entire project with the existing suite of digital resources and open-source tools provided by NYU and
share what we had built. Part of our solution was to use NYU’s institutional repository (known as the Faculty Digital Archive) as the repository for our online library, creating a durable online presence for the nearly 1,000 items in the DCAA, with the added advantage that the FDA is indexed by Google. The design of the DCAA is thus intentionally extensible and scalable, that is, the same basic platform and workflows can be adapted easily for similar projects involving focused collections — and we are already at work on our next digital collection using this template.

The success of the DCAA would not have been possible without Patrick Burns, our Assistant Research Scholar for Digital Initiatives. In February Patrick moved to another exciting post-doctoral fellowship at the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. This is the perfect next step for Patrick, who helped to develop not only the DCAA, but also a host of new applications and workflows for linked bibliography, digital publications, machine learning, mapping, natural language processing, and many other projects, including the curriculum of our team-taught graduate seminar in quantitative and computing approaches to the ancient world. Anyone who has had occasion to study or simply visit ISAW in the last three years will know the privilege it was to work with someone as skillful, as generous, and as intellectually curious as Patrick.  We are grateful for the work Patrick accomplished and added to ISAW’s scholarly efforts.

For news on ISAW Library team members and projects, please visit our blog: http://isaw.nyu.edu/library/blog.