L'ANNÉE PHILOLOGIQUE update

The following message was distributed by email this morning to members of the APA and is reproduced here with permission (hyperlinks added).

Dear APA Member:

We are very pleased to announce that L'ANNÉE PHILOLOGIQUE on the
Internet (APh Online) now has a new and more powerful user interface.
Here are some of its most important new features:

• A Quick Search screen now appears on the initial page and is available
on all subsequent screens.

• A single screen presents all available indices and filters for
advanced searches.

• Each page of search results can be sorted by Author, Title, or
Publication Date.

• An AJAX script makes indices for modern and ancient authors more
powerful.  As the user starts typing in the text box, a list of possible
selections begins to appear, and the list is refined as each letter is
added or removed.

• More options are available for exporting records including: text file,
PDF File, RIS Format, and RefWorks.

• Users can save searches, records, and personal parameters such as
sorting options, number of results per page, and e-mail address.

• APh Online has migrated to OpenURL 1.0 which facilitates rapid
"clicking through" to an electronic version of modern scholarship cited
in an APh record such as a full-text article in JStor.

We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its generous
grant of $48,000 to support the planning of these upgrades, which were
designed by Prof. Eric Rebillard, Director and Editor of APh Online,
with input from Classics librarians and colleagues from the Cornell
University Library.

I am also pleased to report that APA members can look forward to another
major improvement in the near future.  The Mellon Foundation has just
awarded the APA a major grant ($215,000) to create the Classical Works
Knowledge Base (CWKB), a relational database and link resolver that will
allow users of APh Online to "click through" from citations of ancient
texts in an APh record to online versions of those texts, i.e., to do
for ancient texts what is already possible for modern ones.  Prof.
Rebillard will also direct this project in collaboration with Cornell
librarians David Ruddy and Adam Chandler.  A fuller description of the
project and a prototype can be found at cwkb.org.

And in the latest development, a planning grant from the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation has made it possible for Prof. Rebillard to begin exploring
the possibility of linking from images cited in L'ANNÉE records to
online versions of the images themselves.  I hope to have good news
about this initiative by the end of my Presidency this Winter.

As the Director of the Database of Classical Bibliography project, which
was completed last year, I am particularly pleased to see how the
earliest CDROMs, published by the APA in the 1980's, have been
transformed into an up-to-date, web-based resource for the 21st century.
Members must understand that our ability to continue to bring this kind
of major improvement to the field of Classics depends on the success of
the current Gateway campaign.  If we cannot continue to operate the
American Office of L'ANNÉE after the current NEH funding ends, we will
be unable to influence the further development of this vital scholarly
resource.

The Gateway campaign's Endowment for Classics Research and Teaching will
be able to serve both immediate needs like those of the American Office
and future needs that we cannot yet envision.  If you have not yet made
a pledge to the Gateway campaign, it is very important that you do so
now.  If you have already made a contribution, won’t you consider
increasing it? Visit the APA web site (www.apaclassics.org) and click on
Support APA at the top of the page to learn how to make your pledge
either online or by mail.

Thank you very much for your attention to this message and for your
support of the APA.

Dee L. Clayman
President
April 21, 2010

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P.S.  The Winter 2010 Newsletter is now posted on the APA web site in
two formats:

http://www.apaclassics.org/Newsletter/2010newsletter/310news.html

http://www.apaclassics.org/Newsletter/2010newsletter/310news.pdf