Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) Going Open Access

The Editors of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) [ISSN 0017-3916] have issued the following announcement:

Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.

The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.

Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholar¬ship on Greece.

– The editors

This is an excellent move and they are to be congratulated!

Individual Access to The American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Books

Having recently discussed access to digital resources by scholars who are unaffiliated with a subscribing/licensing institution with respect to members of the the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), I received the following notification on Monday from the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Books Project:

HEB is now pleased to make individual subscriptions available through standing membership in any of the 70 ACLS constituent societies.

The subscription offers unlimited access to 2,200 cross-searchable, full-text titles across the humanities and related social sciences. Titles have been selected and peer reviewed by ACLS constituent learned societies for their continued value in teaching and researching, and approximately 500 are being added each year. The collection includes both in- and out-of-print titles ranging from the 1880s through 2009. Titles link to publishers websites and to online reviews in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other sites. Individual subscriptions are USD $35.00 for a twelve-month subscription.

Individual subscriptions are ideal for those whose school might not yet have an institutional subscription to HEB or for individual members of a learned society who might not be affiliated with a subscribing institution.

Please see the links below for more information on individual subscriptions.

Online Purchase

Terms

ACLS constituent societies of particular relevance for ancient studies include

• American Numismatic Society


• American Oriental Society


• American Philological Association


• American Schools of Oriental Research


• Archaeological Institute of America


• Middle East Studies Association of North America


• Society of Biblical Literature

Taking advantage of this offer allows the unaffiliated scholar access to 2,200 fully searchable full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with fourteen learned societies and nearly 100 contributing publishers.

The Virtual Museum of Iraq is Online

The Virtual Museum of Iraq

The Virtual Museum of Iraq was unveiled yesterday in Italy. Available in Arabic, English and Italian, the Virtual Museum of Iraq offers visitors the opportunity to move through eight virtual galleries and see highlights from the collection from the prehistoric to the Islamic period. Animated videoclips provide details.

For a news feature on the virtual museum see Italy puts Baghdad Museum online, (ANSA) - Rome, June 9

The treasures of Baghdad's National Museum went online for the first time Tuesday as Italy inaugurated the Virtual Museum of Iraq as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries.

Looted during the United States-led invasion in 2003, the Baghdad Museum partially reopened in February after six years but the website is designed to make its most important artefacts accessible to everyone...

As far as I can tell there are no reciprocal links between The Virtual Museum of Iraq and The Iraq Museum, which is understood to be the official web presence of the Museum and the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) updates

Late last week, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) added three new data sets:

From announcements circulated by CDLI:

Images of nearly all mathematical tablets kept at Jena are now available online through the CDLI database. The images were produced as part of the publication Tablettes mathématiques de la collection Hilprecht (C. Proust with the collaboration of M. Krebernik and J. Oelsner) = TMH 8 (2008), and were batch-processed to CDLI standard format by UCLA staff.

New images of mathematical tablets from Nippur kept at Istanbul have also been added to CDLI. Like the Jena files, the photographs of the Istanbul texts prepared for CD insertion in the publication Tablettes mathematiques de Nippur (C. Proust; 2007) were processed for web at UCLA...

Please see Proust, "Numerical and Metrological Graphemes: From Cuneiform to Transliteration," CDLJ 2009/1, for a description of plans to include, in the standard format of an alliance of online cuneiform projects led by CDLI and ePSD, transliterations of all cuneiform metrological and mathematical texts.

and

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, in partnership with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, is pleased to announce the addition of new digital content to its web offerings.

In March of this year, two UCLA staff members of the project (Brumfield and Heinle) scanned 148 San Jose tablets, and processed the tablet surface images according to CDLI's "fat-cross" standards to complement the SET (Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty) publication of Rosicrucian and other US tablet collections published in 1961 by Tom B. Jones and John W. Snyder in transliteration only; collations of the REM tablets in SET were subsequently published by M. Cooper in 1986 (ASJ 8, 309-344) and by J. Carnahan and K. Hillard in 1993 and 1994 (ASJ 15, 246-251; ASJ 16, 310). Bob Englund posted these images to web this week; the entire REM collection can be accessed here.

This digital imaging was supported by a National Leadership Grant for Libraries - Building Digital Resources from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and is part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-term preservation of texts inscribed on endangered cuneiform tablets, and to provide free global access to all available text artifact data in furtherance of cuneiform research.

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.

CDLI also produces a variety of other essential resources.

Three journals

• Cuneiform Digital Library Journal (CDLJ)
  
• Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin (CDLB)
  
• Cuneiform Digital Library Notes (CDLN)

Who's Who in Cuneiform Studies
List of standard abbreviations for Assyriology

and more.

Blog changes

I've made two small changes to the blog over the weekend. If you're reading this in a feed reader or by email you may not see them, so if that's the case, click the link and go AWOL.

In the righthand side bar I now have added the widget delivering the feed from Abzu. Abzu is a partner project to this blog. Not everything that appears here appears there, and vice versa. Abzu's focus is on the ancient Near East and Mediterranan world, and AWOL's focus is the ancient world more broadly conceived. It's easy enough to follow both if you wish to.

Also in the righthand side bar is a form allowing you to receive notifications of updates to AWOL by email. This seems useful for those for whom news feeds are not. Your address will be safe. Neither AWOL nor feedburner will send spam. I have been testing it for some weeks and I'm satisfied that it works reliably.

Access to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology at JSTOR

[Links updated 27 January 2012]

Having posted a message in May about the availability of ASOR journals at JSTOR, I am informed that a similar arrangement has been made by the Egypt Exploration Society . Members of the society who do not have institutional access to JSTOR can now have access to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology on JSTOR as an add-on the EES membership. Volumes 1 (1914) - 92 (2006) are currently accessible - there is a five year moving wall.

I can also point you to the EES library catalogue online.

President Barack Obama's visit to Giza in Egypt and Open Access Egyptian Archaeology

Earlier today, as the world knows, President Barack Obama gave an important speech at Cairo University. On this same day, he was given a tour of Giza by the ubiquitous Zahi Hawass. In addition to the usual tour of the pyramids and the Sphinx, he was privileged to visit the tomb of Qar, a small Dynasty 6 subterranean chapel with engaged statuary on the east side of the Great Pyramid. This tomb, numbered G 7101, was excavated in 1924-25 by the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. As luck would have it this tomb is quite completely documented and published in an open access publication from the Giza Archives project, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

William Kelly Simpson Giza Mastabas Vol. 2: The Mastabas of Qar and Idu Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1976

Needless to say, luck has nothing at all to do with it. Peter Der Manuelian and his team have been working for years to organize and provide open access to the archaeological record of the excavations at Giza. For the full documentary record, go to the Giza Archives project page and enter "G 7101" in the search box.