


Archive for the ‘Online Scholarly Resources’ Category

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Wikipedia #1Lib1Ref Effort

January 15, 2016

This week (Jan. 15-23) I’m participating in the Wikipedia Library#1Lib1Ref effort to get more solid sourcing attached to Wikipedia entries. Did you know that Wikipedia is a top 10 source of referrals to CrossRef, the DOI resolver? That means that LOTS of people – including students, academics and librarians – are going to Wikipedia looking for scholarly resources and actually clicking the links to read articles!

Some Wikipedia articles have great footnotes, reference sections, and further reading sections.  Others … do not. Wikipedia is encouraging librarians to add just ONE good quality source to a Wikipedia article today. I’d like to broaden this to encourage anyone with an interest in classical studies to do so as well. And I’ve got an easy way for you to help.

I keep a Zotero library of open-access bibliographies about the ancient world – Ancient World Open Bibliographies. Pick one on a topic you like. Add a link to the bibliography from a relevant Wikipedia article. Or, you know, use your expert knowledge to add a link to the WorldCat record for a book about a topic, or a link (using the DOI) to a scholarly article, or link to a scholarly web project on a classics topic directly.

Editing Wikipedia is actually VERY easy, and does not require you to create a login. I teach students to do it in class in less than 10 minutes. Wikipedia Library has a simple introduction teaching you how to edit Wikipedia if you’ve never used a wiki before.

If you tweet me directly @classicslib when you make you edit, I will give you a twitter heart, even though I think they are silly. I’ll also retweet you – I’ve got 1550 followers, which must be good for something! Hashtagging #1lib1ref will get you seen by the larger world working on this project.

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Finding CIG Citations

January 13, 2016

tl; dr version:

For the Corpus Inscriptionem Graecarum (CIG), all you need to know to find the inscription you want is its unique number, and this is just what most citations will give you. Inscriptions are numbered continuously starting at CIG 1 and continuing through all volumes and parts (ending at CIG 9926).

So, the inscription CIG 284 is 284th from the beginning of the set (it happens to appear in volume 1 part 2).

At the University of Cincinnati’s Burnam Classical Library, some friendly librarian of yore helpfully labeled the volumes with the CIG numbers contained therein:

photo of spines of CIG volumes

  • Volume 1: CIG 1-1792
  • Volume 2: CIG 1793-3809
  • Volume 3: CIG 3810-6816
  • Volume 4: CIG 6817-9926

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story version:

I got a message (on Facebook!) from a friend who is a first-year graduate student in Classics, with a background heavy on philology and light on history/archaeology.

I have a CIG number for an inscription (CIG 284) but I have no idea how to find what volume this would be in.

I’ve been staring at a shelf for like five minutes and I can’t figure out which one would be relevant and/or correct. How do I find this out?

My friend already knew that CIG stood for Corpus Inscriptionem Graecarum (WorldCat record, including volume and parts listings), published by August Bockh between 1828 and 1877. She was standing in front of the print volumes, which are generally next to the much more voluminous volumes of Inscriptiones Graecae (IG), which was created as a continuation of CIG, which I suspect is what perplexed my friend so thoroughly. Note that this, like many 19th century German reference works, is entirely in latin as that was the contemporary lingua franca for the scholarly community.

Since the CIG volumes are old enough to be no longer in copyright, they are available as downloadable .pdf files at Scribd. Many thanks to the communal effort of the group Patrologia Latina Graeca et Orientalis (plgo.org) which made these available! I have not checked these thoroughly for accuracy but in my random perusings have found them to be complete and fully accurate. Links to individual .pdfs at Scribd follow:

The inscription CIG 284 turns out to be the Shield of Alkamenes, which has been owned by the British Museum since 1805 (item number 1805,0703.232), and they have a very nice online catalog of objects. The entry has an image AND bibliographic citations!

24049458240_b2cd1fa267_o

Note, as for this inscription, many things originally published in CIG have been subsequently republished in IG, so to be thorough you may need to look up a given inscription in multiple reference works – perhaps a future post will tackle the complexities of IG citations!

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How to Decipher a Jacoby FGrH Citation

November 11, 2014

TL;DR Version (skip to the long version if you like storytelling and don’t want spoilers):

For a given Jacoby citation in the format (example) 3F11, parse as follows:

  • 3 is the author number. Each author has a unique number. There is an author index in the original print set, in volume III, part C, pp. 947-64, if you know the author’s name but not the number. The authors appear in the print volumes in numerical order (depending on your binding, the author numbers in a given book may well be printed on the spine. Author 3 is in the very first book in the set, natch, following authors 1 and 2.)
  • F is for fragment; T is for testimonial. Once you find the section on a given author, the fragments appear before the testimonia.
  • 11 is the number of the fragment being cited. These appear in numerical order in the print volumes, so 3F11 will follow 3F10 and precede 3F12.

The Long Version

The origin of this post was a plea by IM from a librarian friend who was staffing the chat reference service at an academic library. A student had the citation “3F11” and the knowledge that this referred to Jacoby’s Fragmente Der Greichischen Historiker (usually abbreviated FGrH, so the student had probably already done some work before turning to a librarian.) My friend was able to tell the student that their institution owned the print volumes (WorldCat), although they did not have access to the digital version available through Brill, and that it was a 15-volume set, but the student really wanted a volume and page number.

My friend was hopeful that F stood for “fascicle” and that 3F11 somehow meant volume 3, fascicle 11, and then some unknown page. Jacoby citations are not that straightforward, though; the work is tricky enough to use that a three-volume freestanding index was published by P. Bonnechere in 1999 (WorldCat).  In his 2000 review at BMCR, J. Marincola explained the difficulties:

… although a masterpiece, FGrHist has never been an easy work to use. Jacoby insisted on a peculiar arrangement by sub-genres of historical writing (as he conceived them). This by itself would have been difficult, but it was then further complicated by a concession to practicality, namely, an arrangement by author rather than by individual work. And yet if an author wrote works in a variety of (Jacoby’s) sub-genres (as many did), he could, nevertheless, appear in only one section. Jacoby seems to have decided what work of the author was most important and then assigned him to the category that best described that work. So, for example, Arrian wrote a Parthika (on Rome’s wars with Parthia from the first century BCE to his own time) and a Bithyniaka (a history of his homeland Bithynia), but he is to be found amongst the historians of Alexander’s Successors — no doubt because his Affairs after Alexander is his most important (i.e., for us) fragmentary work. Before the volumes under consideration here, the only help we have had in using FGrHist has been an alphabetical list of authors at the end of III.C., pp. 947-64 …

If either the student or the librarian had been standing in front of the print volumes, this problem of “what does 3F11 mean?” would have been pretty easy to solve. I found out that 3 was the ‘author number’ via the review of the index quoted above, but if you pulled the first volume off the shelf and flipped through, it would have been reasonably apparent that the volume was organized by numbers assigned to authors, and happily enough, author 3 is in the first volume. I could walk up to the books and start flipping and using logic get to the correct page pretty quickly. (A student might still have been kind of intimidated by the sheer volume of information available, plus the fact that nothing is in English.)

Jacoby FGrH volumes on shelf

 

Sorry for the blurriness of some of the iPad photos. I seem to have shaky hands. Here’s our fragment!

Jacoby FGrH 3F11

Now, if you did’t have a citation, but knew that you wanted a fragment of Glaukippos, or whoever, you’d turn to the Author Index in the original print set (vol. III part C pp. 947-64) and find out your author’s number, then find the correct volume for that author. So looking at the page below, Glaukippos is author number 363 and is found in vol. III part B.

Author index in III C of Jacoby FGrH

For a more detailed treatment in list form of the sources of the fragments, the Bonnechard index is the right place to look.  Here’s the page on our friend Author 3 (Pherekydes of Athens):

from 1999 index to Jacoby FGrH

My librarian friend’s institution doesn’t subscribe to the digital Brill’s New Jacoby (which is bundled with digital versions of the original Jacoby volumes in Jacoby Online, and which is not yet complete but estimated to be so in 2017) but I was at the University of Cincinnati Library and they do, so I checked it out.  A search for 3F11 netted 5 results (and unfortunately our fragment was last on the result list for some reason).

Search Results 3F11 - Brill Reference 2014-10-07 13-52-55

Here’s the entry for our fragment 3F11, :

Pherekydes of Athens (3) F 11 - Brill Reference 2014-10-07 13-54-58

 

 

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Solving a Quotation Mystery with Digital Loeb Classical Library

October 8, 2014

I got a message from an old friend – not a classicist – recently:

Many years ago I remember reading a prayer in a Greek tragedy that had a line something like “I’ll be satisfied if my lot is two thirds good.” I believe it was a woman bargaining with the gods during the sacking of Troy. I’m pretty sure it was one of the b-side plays that came in the same book with one of the more famous ones I had to read at [College with a strong classical tradition].

She wondered if it rang a bell to me, as despite intermittent Googling over the years she hadn’t been able to track it down.  I went to Wikipedia for lists of tragedies by the Big Three (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) and used them to jog my memory for plays that might be set at the sack of Troy.  I skimmed free online translations of Euripides’ Trojan Woman and Hecuba without any luck on day 1.

On day 2, I happened to be at the University of Cincinnati Classics Library playing with their trial of the Digital Loeb Classical Library, and kind of on a whim I constructed an Advanced Search asking for all occurrences of the phrase “two thirds” in the works of the three tragedians. (Boolean searching nerdery alert: Author = Euripides OR author = Sophocles OR author = Aeschylus AND words in text = two thirds.)

Bingo! It’s at the end of Aeschylus’ Suppliants:

Image of Loeb Digital Volume of Aeschylus, Suppliants.

So this serves as your teaser for my in-progress post about the Digital Loeb – and also a reminder of the timelessness of classical literature. As my friend wrote, “It stuck with me because it’s just such a humble and reasonable request.” I, too, hope for a life that’s two-thirds good. (And because I am not currently standing in the ruins of a sacked city, I’m feeling like I’m ahead of the game.)

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Update on Google Art Project / World Wonders / Cultural Institute

November 19, 2013

I posted some time ago about Google Art Project, in which Google did a “street view”-like walk through of international museums. They have also done this at archaeological sites, in a set of locations now called Google World Wonders.  Here’s a list of museums and sites relevant to the classical world that now have detailed access through these projects, now collected under the umbrella of Google Cultural Institute:

World Wonders

I may have missed some European cities with Roman-era stuff – there are a lot of “Old City of X” (especially in Spain) and I don’t know my Roman Europe well enough to know all the cities that may have visible architecture (if I’ve missed a doozy, please say so in comments!) There are a LOT more, from multiple parts of the world; if you teach world history or art history at all, it’s well worth a scan for classroom tools. Makes me want to plan some trips!

Art Project museums:

Note that not every display or object in a given museum is included; these are generally selections from the collections. There are 290 museums in total and I haven’t looked at all of them for relevance – there are lots of large city and national museums that probably include a few items from the ancient Mediterranean.  Coverage is thoroughly international, with especially good coverage of Europe, North America, and Asia. Have a look!

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L’Annee Philologique – EBSCO Interface

November 1, 2013

Last month an embarrassingly long time ago now that it’s November, I spent a day off work at the  John Miller Burnam Classical Library at the University of Cincinnati, and among the errands I undertook was a look at their trial of the EBSCO interface to L’Annee Philologique.  Following are my notes, keeping in mind I probably only spent an hour or two total with the database, and several things occurred to me afterwards that I did not have the ability to go back and check on. I welcome comments from others who have tested, or adopted, this interface for L’Annee.

Overall they have done a surprisingly good job of translating the quirks of L’Annee into the standard EBSCO format (when I worked at UGA, we subscribed to a large number of EBSCO databases, so I have spent a lot of time with the blue-and-green logo ball).  But for those of us pretty intimately familiar with both, the mashup is kind of weird and takes some getting used to!

The Basics
The Cincinnati trial put the user by default into the “Advanced Search” interface. In my experience, academic libraries usually get to choose where the user lands, and “Advanced Search” is a pretty obvious choice for a complex index like L’Annee.  A major advantage of Advanced Search at EBSCO (and indeed at most database providers) is it nudges the user in the direction of Boolean searching by presenting 3 search boxes.  They are initially connected by “AND” but there is a drop-down menu allowing the user to change to “OR” or “NOT.”

L'Annee in Ebsco interface Advanced Search

The choices of “fields” (indexes) to search from Advanced Search are as follows, with [notes in square brackets] made by me:

  • TX (All Text Fields) [this is the default]
  • TI [title, obviously]
  • AU [author, ditto – modern author]
  • RW (Author, Reviewed by)
  • SU [appears to search all subject headings by keyword, i.e. both of below]
  • DD (Subjects and Disciplines Prior to Vol. 67)
  • DG (Subjects and Disciplines Vol. 67 & After)
  • AB (Abstract)
  • AN (Accession Number) [N.B. these are unique numbers for each citation in the database]
  • AC (Ancient Authors and Texts) [note of course searching “homer” here gets you nothing – more on this below]
  • SA (Archaeological Sites)
  • ED (Editor)
  • GE (Geographic Subject) [What is this searching? “athens” found 2 results – both Athens, GA. ]
  • IS (ISSN)
  • LA (Language)
  • PE (Name of Scholar) [looks like it searches scholar’s name in subjects]
  • NT (Notes) [cannot figure out WHAT this is searching?!]
  • RS (Publication Name, Reviewed By)
  • DT (Publication Date)

Some of these are rather strange or opaque, as my notes indicate. While being able to search all the indexed fields available in a database is nice, in this case the labels on the fields can be misleading or simply perplexing. There are some that seem so obscure they might better have been left out, in my opinion.  Most entry-level searchers may do best to stick to TX, which does a keyword search of the record (equivalent to a “full text” search in the L’Annee native interface).

What is lost here from the native interface of L’Annee is the extremely useful autofill feature for searching (modern) Authors and Ancient Authors and Texts.  In the native interface, if you start typing “hom” in the box when searching Ancient Authors and Texts, you will automatically be directed to a list of possible matches, which usefully demonstrates that “homer” is not indexed but “homerus” is (in L’Annee, all ancient authors and texts are indexed under their latin names.)

The EBSCO interface does attempt to replicate these useful features by allowing the user to browse some of the indexes – accessed by  More -> Indexes.  Browsing the Ancient Authors and Texts index does not include the autofill feature, however, and there’s no “did you mean” feature here, leading to what I call the classic “Juvenal Fail” in L’Annee:

L'Annee in Ebsco interface Ancient Authors search for Juvenal Fails

Imagine how boggled an undergraduate would be by this! And there’s no help text to tell you to try the latin name.  Browsing for a modern author is less likely to result in failure:

L' Annee in Ebsco interface, Browsing the Author Index

One can also browse the Archaeological Site index, which is very useful for archaeologists, once you get over the hurdle that the site names are all exclusively in French and must be browsed by the strict format “country (site name)”.  So my test of “ath” to try to see what Athens was indexed as brought me sites in Austria:

LAnneee in Ebsco interface Browse archaeological site Site test using Ath

One can also browse the two Subjects and Disciplines indexes, and these operate exactly as in the native interface, where one can expand the broad terms by clicking to reach deeper levels of the subject classification.

Good Things
L’Annee in its native interface abbreviates the titles of journals, which only expand when hovered over with the cursor. In the EBSCO interface journal titles are expanded by default, but abbreviations are also included, and can be searched interchangeably with the full titles.  I tested a search for “aja” and found it returned the same results as a search for “american journal of archaeology.” Yay!

Things I Might Change
The EBSCO interface is in English, of course, but subject headings that appear (i.e. in the sidebar to facet a search after it’s been made, and in individual records, see image below) appear in both French and English (duplicates), which I can see as confusing and/or off-putting to undergraduates who are wary of languages they don’t know.  This seems a strange choice – why not simply include the English translations and leave out the French originals?

L'Annee in Ebsco interface - Record

Another EBSCO feature included in this version of L’Annee is the suggestion of alternative search terms when a search returns few/no results, displaying “did you mean…”.  I found this only appeared some of the time – perhaps the less common vocabulary of classics sometimes stumped EBSCO’s recommender – and when it did appear was sometimes useful and sometimes not. (This is not a problem unique to L’Annee – at one point I had a small collection of wildly irrelevant things databases would suggest to me I ‘might have meant’.) Overall, in assessing whether this feature added value or complicated matters, I might well have chosen to leave it off.

Recommendations
Who might consider purchasing L’Annee through EBSCO in addition to the native L’Annee interface, adding L’Annee at EBSCO when they do not subscribe to the native interface, or switching?  Factors will vary at different institutions.  For starters, I have no information about price.  Anecdotally, I heard from one person that the EBSCO interface was more expensive than the native, and from another person, the reverse.  (This is by no means unlikely – pricing for library subscription databases is generally not transparent, and will vary according to the size and classification of the institution as well as local and/or consortial deals involving purchase of multiple products from a given vendor.)

A second question to consider is who uses L’Annee.  In my anecdotal experience, faculty use it occasionally to rarely – they tend to conduct research by bibliographic chaining out from known items, and looking for new publications by scholars whose work they already know.  Graduate students, especially PhD students, are probably the heaviest users, given their need to move from a position of little knowledge on a subject to mastery of it, often including a full historical literature review.  Graduate students also have a minor tendency to become obsessed with bibliographic completeness (raise your hand if this is you.) In my experience, undergraduates are generally slow to be exposed to L’Annee, even those majoring in Classics at top-ranked institutions. They are unlikely to be using it at all unless a librarian or faculty member has both recommended it and taken the time to demonstrate its value. The EBSCO interface might make L’Annee an easier sell for undergraduates – since after all, you can plop “homer” into a keyword search box that looks pretty standard and get (some) results. Grad students and faculty are more likely to resist change, and in my opinion the EBSCO interface doesn’t add anything valuable enough to the native one to be a dealbreaker.

A third question is, does your institution already subscribe to a large number of EBSCO databases, and is your library promoting a unified search of the local catalog and subscription databases (like GIL-Find/Multi-Search at UGA or Summon at Cincinnati)? If you’re already heavily EBSCO, you’ll likely get a better price, and your students will already feel pretty comfortable with the look and feel of EBSCO.  More classics-themed results will be included in a catalog-and-database combined search. That might make switching worth it.

Who else has had a trial of the EBSCO version of L’Annee? What was your evaluation, and what has your institution chosen to do?

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Information Fluency Workshop: Center for Hellenic Studies

August 30, 2013

(I wanted to title this post “What I did on my summer vacation,” but I figured that would not be very helpful for the search engines out there.)

In July I had the privilege of spending 10 days teaching a workshop on information fluency in classical studies at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC.  It was an incredible luxury to explore a topic in such depth, when in the past I have had at most an hour and a half to reach a group of students! I am very grateful to Kenny Morrell, who invited me to teach this class; Lanah Koelle, our program coordinator/librarian who contributed her expertise at every stage; Allie Marby, CHS’s summer interns, and librarians Temple Wright and Erika Bainbridge, who attended sessions and supported us at CHS, especially in the library; and most especially the workshop students, who gracefully accepted their role as guinea pigs and taught me a great deal.  The students were a mixture on American undergraduates and Greek professionals in education and information fields; each brought an inquisitive spirit and their collective hard work and openness to sharing and new ideas was a major factor in the success of the workshop. Thank you!

As a group we assembled some resources that others who are interested in this topic may find useful.  The first is a Zotero group library with folders that list the session topics. Each folder’s contents include citations for assigned readings for the session (usually fairly short, web-based readings) and citations for information resources we discussed during the session.

The students were asked to complete two assignments.  The first, the development of an annotated bibliography, is available as a Google document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXaPqTDdOUIzI6E26SZiOFjb7a7BMzczWOfh8qXVSJc/. The second, a WordPress Research Guide, is also described in a Google document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O3Rm8yXGlhIRPJh3PrDiMgiAgH0LiHhC44mSvq_9QNk/) and the guide itself is available via the CHS’s website.  The guide should be viewed as a work in progress; we began a project that we hope to flesh out with the participants of future workshops in years to come.

Librarians and scholars interested in libraries and archives in Greece will be delighted by Maria Konstantopoulou’s entry on this topic; Latin teachers can find many fun texts to use with beginning students in George Trapalis’ entry; Matina Goga has assembled a list of valuable links for the study of Greek society and culture; Brittany Profitt has done the same for Roman society and culture; teachers of Greek might want to think about using Tyler Verity’s entry on precisely defining words for a classroom exercise; Ashton Murphy’s entry on reading for research addresses study skills faculty may assume undergraduates possess when they arrive at college; and Vanessa Felso’s entry on latin dictionary resources is a model of clarity, useful for any undergraduate. Use them, and share them!

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