AWOL: Now We are Six!

Happy New Year and happy sixth birthday to AWOL, which launched 6 January 2009.  During those six years I have written and edited 3913 entries.

AWOL passed the three million page views threshold this autumn (with 3,126,777 page views recorded  as of today, to be exact), and now has more than 7400 subscribers by email.  I'm gratified that such a large number of you find AWOL interesting enough to voluntarily add another piece of email to your busy queues each day.

You may follow AWOL directly via News Feed (user count not easy to discover), via Feedburner (these are the ca. 7400 email subscribers), on Facebook (938 likes),  or on Twitter @AWOL_tweets (1,122 followers).  You can also follow AWOL on Google+.

AWOL' s Alphabetical list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies currently includes 1447 titles.   I continuously edit and revise the list as URLs change, titles go offline, and so on.

Since May 2010, Blogger has been keeping detailed statistics on usage of files hosted there. In that period the ten most frequently viewed AWOL pages have been:

Alphabetical List of Open Access Journals in Ancie...	148135
Open Access to all Oxford University Press Online ...	22631
Epigraphischen Datenbank Heidelberg - Epigraphic D...	8375
Les papyrus de Genève 1-3 Online	6463
The Ancient World in JSTOR	4928
Open Access Library: ETANA Core Texts	4755
Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications: Titles wi...	4342
JSTOR Register & Read	2506
Roundup of Resources on Ancient Geography	2343
The British Institute for the Study of Iraq Books ...	1978

AWOL began under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU. I invite you to make use of the full suite of Online Resources from ISAW currently available from ISAW and its collaborators under the terms of open licenses:

Ancient World Digital Library Book Viewer:  The first fruits of an effort to accelerate and enhance access to the emerging global library of digital publications on the ancient world, the AWDL Book Viewer lets users read and search digitized copies of previously printed scholarly materials. In addition to page images of many digitized volumes, AWDL currently hosts an online version of Roger Bagnall and Giovanni Ruffini. (2012) Amheida I. Ostraka from Trimithis, Volume 1: Texts from the 2004–2007 Seasons.

Ancient World Image Bank:  View and download over 3,000 free digital images of sites and objects from the ancient world, contributed by ISAW faculty, staff and friends. Check out the Ancient World Image Bank Group Photo Pool on Flickr for even more images provided by like-minded photographers around the world.

Ancient World Online:  Find out about all the latest online and open-access material relating to the ancient world, regardless of where it's published.

The Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā:  The Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā is a publication of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, realized in collaboration with ISAW. This project aims to recover, preserve, study and make accessible the corpus of inscriptions of ancient Campā (in present Việt Nam), written either in Sanskrit or in Old Cam.

Exhibitions: Learn about the objects and cultures featured in ISAW's public exhibitions at 15 East 84th Street in New York. Even though these exhibitions eventually close or move on to other locations, the websites for them remain, providing permanent access to images, maps and other materials.

ISAW Papers: ISAW Papers is an open-content scholarly journal that publishes article-length works on any topic within the scope of ISAW's scholarly research.

Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE): A joint project of the American Numismatic Society and ISAW, OCRE is a digital corpus of the coinage of the Roman Empire. At present, you can browse or search to find all coin types from Augustus to Hadrian (27 BC – AD 138), and links to examples present in the ANS collection.

Papyri.info: Search and browse over 50,000 ancient Greek and Latin documents preserved on papyrus and other materials. Images, texts, translations and descriptions contributed by scholars and institutions around the world. Get the latest project news via the Digital Papyrology Blog.

Planet Atlantides:  News aggregators for ancient studies. This site gathers together news, commentary and other posts from a variety of blogs and sites around the web and provides the aggregate in an easy-to-read web page as well as in a variety of web feed formats.

Pleiades: Pleiades is a historical gazetteer and more. It gives scholars, students and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create, share, and map historical geographic information about the ancient world. Pleiades is one hundred percent open source, one hundred percent openly licensed and one hundred percent editable.

Social Media: You can follow ISAW on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Google+, or (via one of our web feeds) in your favorite feed reader or aggregator.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, which launched twenty years ago, on 5 October, 1994, at the Oriental Institute, the University of Chicago. AWOL maintains a list of The Oriental Institute Open Access Publications Including Both Digital Manifestations of Print Publications and Born Digital Publications.

In 2001 Abzu relaunched as a component of the ETANA web portal, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
AWOL remains the focus of current digital humanities work at ISAW under the joint direction of Jones and Associate Director for Digital Programs Tom Elliott. With generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, ISAW is working to bring information about the digital resources described in AWOL into the Zotero bibliographic research tool, into ISAW's Ancient World Linked Data JavaScript library, and into the ISAW library cataloging process.

AWOL will receive the Archaeological Institute of America's Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology Award on Friday, January 9, 2015 at 5:30 pm during the Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA.

Finally, I invite you to amuse yourself by browsing through Bookplates of Scholars in Ancient Studies. If any of you have additions, corrections or comments on that, please do get in touch with me.  I'm particularly interested if you can surface other interesting bookplates of scholars of antiquity.

As always, comments - online or offline - about AWOL are welcome.

Earlier administrative notes with user statistics have been posted in October 2012, August 2012,  April 2012, March 2012, November 2011, October 2011,  July 2011, April 2011, January 2011,  December 2010,  October 2010, August 2010,  July 2010, May 2010,  January 2010 , and June 2013.