ADVANCED PAYROLOGICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (APIS)

This application requests support for the continuation of a project encompassing both preservation of a large and important body of ancient manuscript material, through conservation and imaging, and improvement of intellectual access to this material, through cataloging and an innovative and experimental electronic system linking catalog records with images, Greek text, bibliography and published literature. Originally, the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) was conceived as a continuing cooperative venture among six major American universities with cooperation from European institutions. In the first year of its current Phase 3, APIS is becoming a truly global project, encompassing almost all North-American papyrus collections of substantial size and several European institutions that are ready to embark in parallel and fully-compatible projects.

We now seek funding for a further two year period (July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2005) to continue the transformation of APIS into a national and international virtual library of rare ancient manuscript material, with the participation of several new partners from the U.S., North America, and Europe, henceforth called APIS 4. In our APIS 3 proposal we expressed the hope that during Phase 4 (2003-5) we would be able to include all the remaining North American collections, continue cataloging and digital capture of the unpublished materials at the larger collections (Berkeley and Michigan), and bring this project to completion. Because the size of the actual grant for Phase 3 was far below our request, however, completion of the larger collections in Phase 4 is not realistic. There are also some smaller collections that for internal reasons are not yet ready to join the project in this phase. Hence, we now foresee a Phase 5 (2005 and beyond) for the completion of work on all North-American collections, with a smaller number of active partners and a lower budget but continued expansion abroad on local funding.

What is distinctive about this project is that the institutions involved have adopted and implemented collectively a set of standards for imaging, for the formats and for the linking of the several types of electronic data generated. From its conception the entire project was carried out with a view to the creation of an integrated information system, available on the Internet and also in other forms, as the technology evolves. This integrated system has been in operation since the summer of 2000 and many improvements have been made since then with the cooperation of the partner institutions. Thus, the cooperative aspect of this proposal is central to its existence, for it is gradually replacing a world of incompatible, separate systems, each with its own standards, with that of a single, seamless system that is readily usable not only by a handful of papyrologists but also by thousands of scholars and students at all levels of education and in a wide range of other fields. From its timely beginning in 1996, APIS has demonstrated that there will be standards, not only in North America but also worldwide, and it has set an example to other disciplines of what is possible in a world of constantly evolving technologies. In its early phases it brought a renewal of interest in two of the participating collections. This interest is demonstrated in Phase 4 with the participation of several other collections that have been neglected or have remained inactive in research for several decades. At the same time, several European institutions are espousing the standards set by APIS, as they launch parallel projects in this phase.

APIS has two main goals: first, to transform instruction and research in papyrology; and, second, to make papyrological material readily accessible to non-specialists. The latter in fact is becoming its most central outcome. The vast resources of the papyri have until the establishment of APIS been used relatively little either by scholars of most fields concerned with antiquity (literature, history, philosophy, religion, archaeology) or by a broader educated public. In large part this is the result of the extreme difficulty of access to the material. The previous phases of APIS have shown what can be achieved in this respect. The inclusion of new partners in Phase 4 is a guarantee for the continuous enrichment of the APIS virtual library which promises to reach even wider audiences. The forerunners and individual institutions have in the past several years attracted through their own homepages great interest from schools and the general public. The central APIS system—now in full operation—gives an impression of the vast possibilities. Substantial work has been under way to improve the system and make it more user-friendly.

APIS has become a model both in its collaborative creation of field-wide standards and in its integration of different types of information resources of what is possible for a wide variety of fields in humanistic studies. The range of languages recorded in the papyri will stretch the capabilities of information technology in a fashion certain to be useful to other fields.

The significance of the survival and the information contained in the papyri cannot be discussed adequately in just a few paragraphs. It will suffice to state that papyri are the most important written records we have from the ancient world that cover the entire range of private and public life.

Papyrus was the most important writing material of the ancient world and perhaps Egypt's most important legacy. Alongside it were used other (often cheaper) materials, like wood and clay (broken pottery shards with writing are called ostraca). On these materials were recorded everything from high literature to the myriad of documents and other communications of daily life in a variety of scripts and languages reflecting the mosaic of cultures of ancient Egypt, with Greek and Egyptian (Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic scripts) being the predominant languages. Texts in Latin and Aramaic are less common; a substantial number of Arabic texts date from the seventh century onwards.

About one in ten of those studied to date is a fragment of literature, either a far more ancient witness to a work known otherwise from medieval manuscripts or a text hitherto lost in antiquity. From the literary papyri the modern scholar learns about the state of literary texts in antiquity before errors were compounded in the manuscript tradition of the Middle Ages. From among these papyri the modern world has recovered such important works as the lyrics of Sappho and the Paeans of Pindar, the verses of Callimachus, the comedies of Menander, the Mimes of Herodas, the orations of Hyperides, the Constitution of the Athenians by Aristotle, lost plays of the classical Athenian dramatists, and early Christian and Gnostic works which once competed with the New Testament.

Nine of ten published texts are private letters or documents of every conceivable sort –legal and business papers, government regulations, property records and transactions, petitions to high officials, tax and rent receipts, bank deposits and payments, farm and crop reports; one of them might even contain the only original signature of the Macedonian Queen Cleopatra VII. [1] As such, these documentary texts differ little from modern archival material; except for their usually fragmentary nature and extreme antiquity, they reflect the quotidian affairs of state, public and private life in much the same way modern records do.

The documentary papyri have provided new material and directions for the fields of social, economic, and administrative history which have all but displaced the older histories of kings and battles. The papyri (using the term to encompass the other materials) are thus the source of a large part of what we know about many aspects of antiquity, particularly those concerned with economic life, social relations, cultural interaction in a pluralistic society, and daily life.

Before APIS relatively little classical material for general audiences was available in electronic form, and that (mainly through the Perseus project) had primarily been concentrated on the archetypal canonical period, Periclean Athens. [2] Since then, the developments have been rapid: Perseus has expanded in time, scope, materials and tools, and several hundreds of, more or less, specialized home- and resource-pages, as well as discussion lists, have emerged. [3] APIS is part and parcel of these developments, because, from its conception, it has been designed to be usable both by experts and by non-specialists; it opens up material outside the canon that traditionally is studied and interpreted only by experts; and it allows the full diversity of a multilingual and multicultural ancient society to be visible both in text and in images to the students. There is no other body of ancient material with such dramatic potential for broadening the ability of students to grasp the reality of a world in which not everyone was a Greek or a Roman, not all activities were the sole province of men, and not everyone was rich.

This material is by its nature of central importance for ancient history and literature, but it is also of immense importance for several other areas and scholars. For example, the papyri have transformed our understanding of the development of the Greek and Latin languages in everyday use, a matter of importance not only for historical linguistics, but also for the way scholars read Jewish and Christian sacred texts. From the papyri, moreover, have come abundant new works of religious literature not only for Judaism and Christianity, but also for traditional Greek and Roman cults, for Manicheism, and for the early history of Islam. An active project in Italy collecting the philosophical papyri bears witness to the importance of this material for the history of philosophy. In other instances, the discovery of papyri has provided the only written witness for the history of as significant a city as Petra in modern Jordan, which disappears from the record after the third century A.D. The relatively recent discovery (1993) of a family archive of carbonized papyri in that city, is the only testimony that the city was far from extinct in the sixth century due to the earthquake of 551 A.D., as was argued ten years ago. The papyri are also our most important source for the actual working of law in ancient societies and help make it possible to test the theoretical doctrines derived from jurisprudential literature. And the papyri are (along with archaeology) the main source of raw data from antiquity capable of allowing the insights of the quantitative social sciences to be applied to antiquity.

The main contributions of APIS in Phase 4 will be the following: First of all, it will take advantage of, and expand, standards in preservation, cataloging and imaging that were set forth in the first three phases; secondly, it will make information available to scholars and general public throughout the world via the Internet, especially in a field that has been perceived as arcane and esoteric; large collections such as Michigan and Berkeley, and more recent partners such as Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Stanford will make available for the first time information on previously unpublished texts. And, thirdly, it will become a global repository of information drawn from almost all the North American collections with substantial contributions also from some of the largest European collections.

The participating American collections, described below, are all of great international importance and collectively they represent around 98% of the American holdings of such documents, with more than 50,000 items. Hence, APIS in its next phase will literally become the virtual library of almost all the holdings of such materials in North America. Nearly 45 volumes of texts from the collections have been published or are in press, and active work is in progress in all of the major and some of the smaller collections. Because several important European collections have never disclosed information about the number of papyri they possess, it is impossible to provide an accurate world context for these numbers, but at a rough estimate all the above institutions probably possess more than a tenth of the total.

In the first phases of APIS, the six most substantial in size and scholarly value collections formed the backbone of this project: Berkeley, Columbia, Duke, Michigan, Princeton, and Yale. They also included those with the most active current programs of graduate instruction in papyrology in the United States (Michigan, Duke, and Columbia). These collections have distinctive histories and collectively they dominate American holding in this area. In Phase 2, the most important collection in the UK, that of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (including the Oxyrhynchus papyri, the single most important and respected publication series of papyri) started preliminary work following the APIS standards, and joined as partner in Phase 3. [4] While a lot of the work has been completed in four of the above collections, a lot remains to be done with the unpublished papyri in Berkeley and Michigan, because of their number, and these two collections are playing a leading role in the current Phase 3. The project has been virtually completed at Columbia, Duke, Princeton and Yale but these institutions continue to maintain and update their records or to add digital images for several papyri with internal or private funding. In APIS 3, four institutions that house six smaller collections in North America joined the APIS project: the University of Chicago (Regenstein Library and the Oriental Institute); Washington University in St. Louis; the University of Pennsylvania (with two collections); and the University of Texas at Austin. Texas, however, lost David Martinez to the University of Chicago in the period between the submission of the grant and the announcement of the award, and due to lack of qualified personnel could not becoming a contributing partner. In Phase 4, three new national partners join APIS: New York University; Stanford; and the University of Wisconsin; together these institutions hold approximately 1,000 papyri.

On the international level, several important European collections committed to joining APIS in Phase 3: we have already mentioned the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, U.K.; the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek of Vienna, Austria, one of the three largest papyrus collections in Europe, and Leiden University, the Netherlands, had also expressed strong interest in joining APIS. However, Vienna did not receive the funding needed to begin the project, and Leiden lost its main papyrologist, Arthur Verhoogt, who has now joined the University of Michigan. In Phase 4 of APIS, Oxford will continue its participation with two projects that will contribute substantially to the rich resources of APIS; these projects include the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (mentioned above) and the digitization of thousands of photographs of papyri in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This digitization will be carried out by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD), which, thanks to a major grant from the Mellon Foundation will digitize the vast resources of the International Photographic Archive of Papyri from its missions to Cairo in past decades and will create brief catalog records which will be fully APIS compatible; these records will begin to migrate to APIS central near the end of Phase 3. Additionally, the following institutions will also join APIS in Phase 4: the University of Toronto (with three collections; they became unexpectedly part of APIS already in Phase 3 and APIS related activities are already under way); Oslo University (they have already begun cataloging work and digital capture); the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (their catalog, created with the Michigan FMPro template, and digital images are already available on the WWW); and the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg (where delays have been caused by internal administrative complications). We are in contact with all of the new partners and we will be providing them and any other collection wishing to join APIS with detailed technical specifications to allow this happen without extensive work on the part of the new partners. For information on the international partners and letters of commitment, see Appendix 1.

The American collections that participate in APIS 4 have distinctive histories and strengths. Their contents are described in Appendix 2.

Like classical studies generally, papyrology has been ahead of most humanistic disciplines in applying information technology to the management of information and the support of research. In this respect, it has shown the electronic equivalent of the leadership role that it has played in conventional research tools since the early part of this century.

Today, for example, we have in electronic form 100 percent of the published texts of Greek and Latin documentary papyri and ostraca (until June 30, 1998) through the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), available on CD and on the WWW through Perseus and a mirroring site at CSAD in Oxford; a typological electronic catalog that allows search of dates of all the published papyri (51,650 records till May 2002) has now been completed in Heidelberg, Germany, and is available on CD and the web (http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~gv0/ gvz.html)–henceforth, HGV– [5] and has been embedded into the DDBDP; a completed electronic version of recent bibliography (1960-2002) through the files of the Bibliographie Papyrologique (BP); several completed or almost completed projects in the area of cataloging of collections, using a standard catalog record type, with extended subject access (at Duke, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale); work underway for APIS at several member institutions in image capture and cataloging, including the Oxyrhynchus papyri at Oxford, England; and a central APIS interface that allows for search of records from all the partner institutions that have contributed records so far. These resources are described in more detail later in this application.

Several other relevant undertakings must be mentioned here: an electronic catalog of all the known literary texts from Egypt is now available in searchable form on CD from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and on the WWW, known as the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB); this database provides now links to the on-line Catalogue of Mythographic Papyri from the same institution; work is still in progress on the Chicago Demotic Dictionary Project that has both text and images for cursive late Egyptian in Macintosh word processing format; samples are now available also on-line (http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/DEM/Demotic.html). Prosopographical projects are underway in Louvain (converting the Prosopographia Ptolemaica to electronic form) and in London (creating a prosopography of Roman Egypt; it will coordinate technological standards with Louvain). Several other APIS derivative projects were presented at the 23^rd International Congress of Papyrology in Vienna, in August 2001.

These developments together have begun to transform scholarship in the field and increasingly continue to do so. However, it should be noted that only the APIS related projects have really cut loose from the technology of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the existing resources are available on the web, some on CD, a few on floppy-disk, and some not at all outside the place of creation. In fact, decisions to make many of these projects available on-line were made recently under the strong influence of APIS. Like most projects of that bygone era in the humanities, these are rapidly being left behind as user interface software moves forward at astonishing speed. This is why the original consortium of six institutions decided to build an Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) to fill in the gaps in our digitized resources, take advantage of current access technology, and allow later developments to be added as they become available.

Much work has already been carried out by the partner institutions from the inception of the project to date (Phase 3, year 1). This work and that to be completed, both by the old and the new partners, during the next two years, is described in brief in the following paragraphs. The state of things expected at the end of Phase 3 by the partner institutions and the state of things of the new participants is treated in more detail in the individual institutional work plans included in the appendixes of this application. In all cases the work completed will match or even exceed the targets set in the revised workplan of APIS 3.

The revised workplan for APIS 3 set the following goals: First, we promised to complete tasks begun in earlier stages on the central interface and to add information from the new partner institutions. More specifically, we promised to enhance, expand and update the operating central system by adding several thousands new records, hot links to the Greek texts of the DDBDP, and new tools as they are made available. In view of the reduced funding, however, we foresaw a reduction of the amount of improvement of the central database. Second, the major original partners (Michigan and Berkeley) had promised to produce several hundred new catalog records and digital images, and to perform conservation work on their collection, while the new partners (Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Washington University) had promised to lay the foundations of the cataloging, digitizing, and conservation processes, and contribute samples of their work to the central interface.

During the year from July 1, 2001 to present steps were taken toward the consolidation of the central interface system and the restructuring of the local in-house databases (File Maker Pro at Michigan, and Access at Berkeley, both used virtually by all new partners) to conform as fully as possible with the data structure of the central interface. A planning meeting of all the partners (including the University of Toronto) was held in Ann Arbor on November 30 and December 1, 2001 where several issues pertaining to the central interface and the local in-house databases were discussed and resolved (For the minutes of the meeting, see Appendix 3).

At present, the central interface (http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/apis/) contains 18,632 catalog records with links to the Greek text of the DDBDP and digital images; this figure will grow to over 20,000 by the end of Phase 3. As of this date, the following changes have occurred on the central interface level: we have made incremental improvements to the search engine functionality and the retrieval response time, and implemented a 24x7 support environment for APIS; hence, APIS has been integrated into Columbia's evolving 24x7 environment. By the end of Phase 3 we are likely to have made more substantive changes to the indexing (e.g., to provide a generalized keyword search), to make existing keyword searching more precise. We are also likely to have rewritten the preliminary search screens for ease of use and also to allow result sets to be "paged through" rather than listed all at once. Plans are also under way to find means to display the number of hits for a search before actually retrieving them, in case the user wants to modify the search in advance.

For reasons of standards and conformity in the data structure between the central interface and the local databases, Michigan (FMPro based) and Berkeley (Access based), redesigned their in-house templates. The process of rewriting them has virtually been completed. The new templates will provide more standard metadata input to the central system and they can be used by other existing and new partners for data entry. This will save precious time for the central system operation.

On the DDBDP front –the backbone of APIS which contains more than 50,000 texts–, all of the volumes published up to June 30, 1998 have been entered. As of this date, another nine volumes of texts have been entered (approximately 2,000 texts), but need to be proofread, and some sixteen volumes that have appeared since 1998 will be entered during Phase 4. The texts of the DDBDP are in SGML format with the modified Beta Greek used at the Perseus Project and were converted during APIS 2 with the help of the Perseus project. The new texts need now to be put on the web and to be added to the material in the DDBDP. Duke University that bears the main responsibility for the DDBDP was able to work in the interim year between Phase 2 and Phase 3 with support from the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Duke.

The necessity of an independent web base for the DDBDP has been evident for the past three years. The Perseus Project has supported our efforts to create a site that Duke University could manage, making corrections and adding new material. This project seemed daunting and expensive. Fortunately, Dirk Obbink at Oxford wanted to created a data bank of literary and subliterary texts found on papyrus. His intent was to model data entry on the methodology of the DDBDP. After some exploration, it became clear that we could best proceed by combining efforts and financial resources. At Duke the Vice-Provost for International Affairs made available funds to undertake this project; at Oxford funds were available from grants by the Council on the Arts and Humanities. After some experimentation and extensive searching, Religion and Technology Inc. has been engaged to create an independent website for the DDBDP. No NEH funds have been used for this work, but clearly the results are very much part of the DDBDP's role in the entire APIS project. At this time we are guardedly optimistic that we will achieve an initial goal of having a manageable DDBDP at its own website. The site will function exactly as the Perseus site has functioned with a sophisticated search program and the lexical and morphological tools established by the Perseus Project.

In the course of this grant period, the fifth print edition of the Checklist of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets appeared (July 2001). In addition, as previously, the Checklist is kept current on the web (www.scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/clist.html). The website has been developed into a much more easily searchable and maintainable database using the DreamWeaver program.

(1) Duke. The Endowment supported a pre-APIS project at Duke University for conservation, cataloging (to US-MARC AMC standards), and imaging (by color scanning) of the entire collection. Duke was also the first institution to put images of all its papyri on the Internet in combination with catalog records, linking them with hypertext markers. Duke has been responsible primarily for the DDBDP, for updating the Checklist of Editions (for both of these tasks, see above) and for the enhancement of the Duke Papyrus Archive (which currently contains images of 1,375 pieces). See, http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/

(2) Michigan. The start of APIS at the University of Michigan rested on a large amount of work before the formal beginning of the project, including extensive studies with digital images of papyri since 1991 and a local electronic catalog of the published papyri dating from the same era. Michigan also created the first papyrological web site in 1993 which was used for testing the various types of image capture with an interactive electronic questionnaire. At this moment, Michigan is the largest contributor to the APIS project with more than 2,700 complete catalog records and multiple images at two levels of resolution (300 dpi and 600 dpi) for more than 2,000 papyri. Michigan has also produced translations for all the documentary texts (many of them did not exist in the printed edition). In the interim year between Phases 2 and 3, Michigan conserved and digitized a small collection of 12 papyri from the EES redistribution that is currently located at Bridwell Library, in the Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. These texts will be cataloged and added to the APIS holdings in Phase 3. Michigan in coordination with the APIS-central has redesigned its in-house database template to conform fully with the central APIS record structure; this template will be used by the majority of the new partners in Phase 4. As a result of the 9/11/01 events, Phase 3 begun in Michigan with a delay on March 1, but already 150 new records have been created, and several of these papyri have been conserved and digitized. See, http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/

(3) Columbia. The conversion of the retrospective BP records (back to 1960) into electronic form was completed before APIS begun, and by the end of the first year of APIS 2, Columbia completed the cataloging of its papyrus and ostraca collections. Enhancement of the records of papyri that were purchased in the 1940s and 1960s, establishing and correcting discrepancies in the existing data, and image capture (with private funding) have been the major contributions of Columbia since APIS 2, in addition to maintaining and updating the central interface. In the spring of 2002, during renovations of the Butler Library, the entire papyrus collection has been rehoused in acid-free folders and boxes, and a bit earlier the collection of ostraca was also rehoused in a similar environment. See, http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/apis/

(4) Yale. Beginning in 1993, Yale undertook at its own expense a conservation program for the papyrus collection; all items were sorted individually and housed in acid-free paper. During APIS 1, with its own funds, Yale completed the process of conserving, cataloging, and mounting the items in Plexiglas. Yale also created an electronic in-house database of all its catalog records; this is now being converted to US-MARC records for the central interface. During APIS 2, Yale concentrated on the production of 4x5 inch color transparencies for the very large papyri that cannot be scanned in a single pass by the digital camera. Since Phase 2, Yale has been concentrating on digital capture and on record enhancement with its own funding. See, http://inky.library.yale.edu/ WWWpapyrus.htm

(5) Berkeley. The absence of a papyrologist on the Berkeley faculty for decades led to very little activity in the collection. The International Photographic Archive of Papyri, funded by the Endowment, photographed about 6,500 pieces and put more than 20,000 fragments into acid-free folders. During APIS 1 and 2, Berkeley placed special emphasis on the preservation aspect of their decaying collection, based on a pre-APIS report drawn up by a Dutch papyrologist, Arthur Verhoogt. During APIS 1, Berkeley conserved, cataloged and imaged more than 400 of the papyri previously housed in decaying Vinylite mounts. An additional 500 papyri were conserved in the two years of APIS 2. In the same period, 600 new catalog records and 1,200 digital images were created. Scholarly response to this neglected collection has been very positive and culminated with the creation of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the end of 2000—an Organized Research Project supported by the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Dean of Letters and Science, and the Departments of Classics and Near Eastern Studies. In the Spring of 2001 Dr. Todd Hickey was hired at Berkeley; his position is funded partly by the Endowment and partly by the Center. Since 1 July 2001, 486 catalog records have been entered into the Berkeley database—63 more than promised for Year 1 of Phase 3. Of these papyri, 210 have been conserved and remounted. Library Photographic Services will resume digitization in July, 2002. See, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ APIS/index.html

(6) Princeton. Before the start of APIS-1, Princeton created a basic finding aid for the collection. During Phase 1, this finding aid, which covers essentially the entire collection, was converted into an SGML-tagged text file and into database records in Phase 2. The records for Egyptian texts were created at Princeton, using the expertise of external consultants. Since Phase 2, Princeton has been enhancing its records with internal funding. See, http://www.princeton.edu/ papyrus/index.html

Given the reduced funding at the new partner institutions, good progress has been made to date. More specifically:

(7) Oriental Institute. Phase 3 begun with a slow start due to a combination of factors. The project's research assistant, Hratch Papazian, was able to attend the round-table meeting of all participants in Ann Arbor (mentioned above), which was enormously beneficial. The final signing of the subcontract with the University of Michigan took place in the winter of 2002, and after the creation of an account line they were able to proceed with the purchase of a computer and the necessary software. In March the OI was notified that the database template was being updated by the University of Michigan and decided to wait until the new version was completed. The template is now available and the OI has begun data entry.

(8) Pennsylvania. Most of the work done on the APIS project in the past year has been preparatory for a full scale data and image entry effort in summer 2002. An APIS compatible template for data entry has been prepared by the Library technical staff, and the Library has also agreed to create new images as needed. During summer 2002, Penn will confirm and enter all existing information on the 150 or so fragments in the collection that was housed at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, now in temporary storage at the main University Library, with links to the images; in the same period the metadata will migrate to the APIS central interface. Some of the more significant pieces will also receive standard "first edition" treatment, gathering together any previous work and making it available in an appropriate format.

(9) Washington University. J. Manning, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Stanford University served as papyrological consultant from November 8-14, 2001, and produced a report evaluating the collection (to be submitted as part of the grant report for year 1, Phase 3). In addition, the following have been accomplished: 1) the papyri have been inventoried and re-housed in appropriate archival containers; 2) Images of the papyri are in the process of being prepared for use on the WWW; 3) Meta-data has been prepared for use with digital surrogates of the papyri that have already been published. This will be reviewed by a member of the faculty from the Classics Department before posting.

Papyrus is a remarkably durable material, far more permanent than acidic paper of the period since 1850 and on the whole even more than the rag paper in use before then. But it is of course much older than paper manuscripts, and most papyri are torn on several, if not all, sides. They usually emerge dirty, crumpled, and twisted, unless they have been preserved in a box or jar (as occasionally happens). Ostraca are often broken, and sometimes have significant salt in the fabric if they have lain in land reached by the Nile's waters. Some preliminary conservation is generally done by dealers or in the field, but usually full cleaning and straightening is left for "laboratory" work in the modern library where these materials normally reside.

In most papyrus collections, conservation work is carried out by papyrologists, that is, by scholars rather than professional conservators. Reasons for this state of affairs include the relatively simple character of much of the work to be done and, especially, the absence in many places of any institutional support for conservation work. In a few of the larger collections, like the Austrian National Library in Vienna or the State Museum in Berlin, Germany, full-time conservators are employed. There is fairly widespread agreement in the field on the main techniques used; these are described in a book by Michael Fackelman, former conservator in Vienna. [6] Special techniques for working with carbonized rolls have been developed by the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Naples) and by Jaakko Frösén (Helsinki), the latter of whom has been retained for work on the carbonized rolls found in recent excavations at Petra. [7]

Before the beginning of APIS, the University of Michigan created a brief guide to current best practice in papyrus conservation, which was developed to its present form in collaboration with conservation staff at the other APIS partner institutions. Most of the institutions have had library conservators rather than papyrologists to do conservation work throughout the project, in part as a result of the lack of opportunity to train the papyrological staff.

Big progress has been made on the conservation of the collections of the majority of the partner institutions, partly thanks to Endowment support and partly thanks to institutional funding. As already indicated, the Duke collection is now thoroughly cleaned, straightened and mounted in suitable glass. The papyri are stored in acid free boxes in the vaults of the Special Collections Library.

Before APIS conditions at Columbia and Michigan were variable. However, this picture changed during APIS at Columbia. The Columbia ostraca, acquired in the 1960s from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which until APIS had not even been systematically examined, let alone given any care, have been relocated to an acid-free storage cabinet environment. As mentioned above, new acid-free boxes have been used recently, more appropriately sized to prevent excessive build-up of weight from glass. The papyri are now in almost all cases no more than three layers deep in these boxes, where more than twice that was once common. Papyri in folders have also been put in new boxes with reduced contents in each box. At the end of the 2001-02 year, the collection of ostraca was relocated from the current cases to acid-free boxes in anticipation of being moved into inaccessible storage during renovations of the Butler Library. After renovation there will be new cases provided in a permanent location in the vault.

The Michigan and the formerly Cornell papyrus collections are housed in an environmentally controlled chamber which was built with institutional funding before APIS. A condition report of published documents on papyrus and other substrates in the Michigan collection was conducted in June-July, 1994 and the report was included in the APIS 1 application. Before the start of the project, the bulk of the collection was rehoused in acid-free folders and boxes, and the pieces in glass were checked systematically: a total of some 6,000 papyri were thus given preliminary preservation attention. During APIS approximately 1,100 papyri have been treated systematically and rehoused in new glass by conservation staff before digital capture. Conservation at Michigan has been part of the institutional cost-sharing.

As mentioned above, the bulk of Berkeley's collection was put in acid-free folders by the International Photographic Archive in 1979. Much of the rest, however, was either in Vinylite mounts of the 1930s, which needed replacement, or was kept in tin boxes from the time of the excavation (details were given in Appendix 10 of the Phase 1 application). Since the inception of APIS a total of 20,000 papyri have seen the successful removal of decaying mounts and their placement in acid-free folders. Since July 1, 2001, approximately 210 have been conserved and remounted between new glass.

Work on the Yale collection is described above in section 3. The entire collection has been given conservation treatment and rehoused. It is kept in the controlled environment of the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library.

Princeton's collection had little conservation attention for some years and conservation was to a large degree the result of APIS. The conservation of the Pharaonic papyri was a key goal of Phase 2, and this work was been completed successfully. The papyri have now been relocated to the climate-controlled chamber described in the APIS 1 application.

The Chicago collections (Regenstein and Oriental Institute) have received different degrees of attention. The Goodspeed collection, housed in the Department of Special Collections, is in fairly good condition, but nearly all the papyri need re-housing. Most of the collection is either in plastic sleeves or in glass panes with acidic paper backing. A smaller number are mounted in multiple fragments in Plexiglas. The Oriental Institute, on the other hand, owns papyri and a good collection of ostraca. The papyri are either mounted in glass or Plexiglas or are kept in folders, but their conservation status is virtually unknown. Some of the mounting predates the acquisition of the collection and others are more recent. The ostraca come from controlled, scientific excavations and, in general, they are in good condition. Both papyri and ostraca are housed in the Oriental Institute's climate-controlled research and storage facility.

The collections of papyri at the University of Pennsylvania have also received different attention: those owned by the CJS—now in temporary storage at the University Library—were treated in part in 1982-84 by non-expert conservation staff and without consultation with a papyrologist. In the 1990s Profs. Jennifer Sheridan and, then, Robert Kraft, realized the mistakes and then proceeded to repeat the conservation process by first joining the fragments correctly and then glassing many of the items. But more systematic conservation is still needed. As for the UPenn's Museum papyri, cataloging, mounting, identification and study of the collection have taken place sporadically since the first acquisition. Only an estimated 10% of the collection has been edited and published in any form. In 1966, Kraft and Antonia Tripolitis, an interested graduate student, found that numerous fragments were still stored in boxes and had not been mounted or flattened. They began by flattening and mounting the contents of one of the storage boxes. When it became apparent that fragments of what was originally the same papyrus might be found in several different boxes or might already be mounted under glass, the idea of mounting the materials immediately after flattening was abandoned. Instead, the flattened pieces were placed in lined folders for storage and classification until all the fragments of a document could be located. This intended project never materialized in a systematic manner. It is now hoped that this project will materialize during Phase 4, immediately after completion of work on the CJS papyri.

Washington University has taken the first steps towards a conservation program, already before their participation in APIS 3. They produced a preliminary assessment of the condition of the objects, rehoused those in acidic to acid-free folders, and measured the objects as a prelude to enclosure. They had examined methods of glazing the papyri ranging from the traditional glass sandwich, to Plexiglas sandwich, to spot-welded Mylar, and then sought guidance from APIS partners on developing an appropriate approach to this problem and adopt the best practice. All the papyri are now inventoried and rehoused in appropriate archival containers.

The condition of the collections of the new partner institutions is uneven. Stanford's collection in the Department on Classics is kept in one archival box in the Department. The Greek papyri are glazed between glass, several pieces mounted under each piece of glass. The Demotic papyri, with one exception, are stored between paper. The other collection is housed in the Department of Special Collections in folders and kept in three boxes, but the whereabouts of some of the papyri that have been glazed remain unknown. The condition of New York University's collection is less than ideal. Some papyri have been glassed and are stable overall. However, tape holding the glass plates together has begun to ooze and some fragments have slid dangerously close to the sticky adhesive. Each glassed papyrus is stored in an acid-free file folder, and the folders are in turn stored in acid-free document cases. This arrangement is problematic, since the folders and their contents slide about from not fitting snugly in the document cases. A large number of papyri are in much worse shape, because they are stored loose in acid-free file folders and thus rub against each other and against the folder containing them. As a result, small pieces have broken off from many items.

Once again, there are large historic differences among the partners in this project, but these have been diminished substantially by the work in the two phases of APIS. All of the 1,375 Duke papyri have been cataloged in US-MARC AMC records that are part of the Duke Library catalog and also added to RLIN and OCLC, and the APIS central interface. It has, thus, a mode of access that for the combination of accessibility and quality is unparalleled in the world.

Until 1991, access to the Michigan collection was based on a typewritten acquisitions record. Subsequently, Michigan developed a detailed electronic catalog for the published and unpublished papyri, ostraca and other written materials, including also the papyri from the Cornell collection (see above section 3). This database was migrated to FileMaker Pro in the summer of 1996 and recently to the new adapted FMPro 5.5 template modeled on the US-MARC AMC format (see above). Because of the size of the collection and the numerous scholars involved in research, the database—in staff mode, locally—provides access to a special field that marks the exact physical location of each published papyrus within the storage chamber. In this respect, the database acts also as a means of physical control of the collection. In the year between APIS 2 and 3, Michigan made available in electronic marked-up form also the original acquisition reports of the papyrus collection and other related documentation. The approximately 3,400 records are now available both through the local server and the APIS central interface.

At Columbia there was until 1995 only an index-card file, with typed entries of the briefest sort, including only some of the papyri and none of the ostraca; this was kept in the curator's office. Work just before and, especially, during APIS has led to the creation of electronic records for all published papyri, some 150 unpublished Arabic papyri, and around 3,600 ostraca. Hence, Columbia's electronic cataloging is essentially complete and the records are available through APIS central.

Yale created its own electronic database of the papyri in its collection, using the program Inmagic. Its fields were mapped to US-MARC by academic information staff at Columbia and the database converted to be APIS compatible. Yale's electronic cataloging is complete and the records are available both through the local server and on APIS central.

During APIS 1 and 2, Princeton produced the Descriptive Inventory of Princeton University Collections of Papyri (DIPP) which is available through the institutional server. Their records were mapped to US-MARC at Columbia and the records are available through APIS central. Princeton's electronic cataloging is complete.

Access to the University of Chicago collections is currently only local and restricted: the collection at the Oriental Institute is part of the Museum. As such, it is included in the Museum Registry database. There is an electronic and a paper version. These registries are available only to scholarly visitors to the museum collections. Additionally, there are acquisition files which include inventories of objects in particular acquisitions groups. The Goodspeed papyri at the Regenstein are registered in a typewritten inventory catalog, but have no collection level MARC record at this time. There are a few minimal MARC records for 9 individual papyri and the paper finding aid lists the papyri with Goodspeed number and University of Chicago Library Ms. number and publication information for each. But it is out of date since it does not include the 3 that came into the Library in 1988.

The collections at the University of Pennsylvania have both a paper finding aid and very basic electronic records (but available through an outdated gopher server); the best known collection to the scholarly public, thanks to the efforts of J. Sheridan and R. Kraft, is the one that belongs to CJS. However, very few items have been published in volumes or scholarly journals and only 10% of the Museum collection has been studied systematically. By the end of Phase 3, the CJS collection will be available through electronic catalog records both on the local and on the APIS central server.

Until the beginning of APIS 3 at Washington University, there was no systematic register or catalog, except for the published papyri in two volumes in the 1970s and 1980s. The contents of two thirds of the collection were virtually unknown. In Year 1 of Phase 3, however, an internal inventory was created and meta-data has been prepared for use with digital surrogates of the papyri that have already been published. These will be available through APIS by the end of Phase 3.

The situation in the new partner institutions is variable, but similar to that of the original APIS partners before the beginning of the project. Many collections are unknown outside the institution and finding aids, where they exist, have only local access.

New York University has a basic typewritten inventory for only one portion of the collection that is available only locally. All the papyri were photographed in 1977; both photos and negatives exist. The situation is similar in Wisconsin, except that all the papyri have been published in two volumes. At Stanford, the Classics Department collection has no inventory. The collection in the University Libraries was examined by Bradford Welles and a preliminary inventory was created by John Shelton; however, this inventory list cannot be located by current scholars.

As is clear from the above, big strides have been made in the APIS partner institutions thanks to Endowment support. However, there is still a lot of work to be done on the unpublished materials in the large collections (Berkeley and Michigan) and all the new partner institutions. Electronic technology has had a serious impact in making papyrological material available to scholars in other areas of the study of antiquity and to a broader educated public, both through the institutional catalogs and also through the central interface site. Many recent publications in academic journals demonstrate that APIS has become a worldwide tool of research: a number of European papyrologists have been publishing papyri from American partner institutions based on images made available through APIS. We believe that we can go further by enhancing our current central system whereby the high technical threshold of serious research will no longer be a barrier to wider educational use of the material housed in all the North American collections and beyond. The core of this breakthrough is the combination of the subject cataloging and descriptive text (as developed in the Duke catalog project and as currently implemented in the APIS central interface), with translations of the published papyri and contemporary knowledge-base navigation tools and images deliverable over the web. Our experience from APIS is that these can together provide sufficient access information to allow students and people with general background in ancient studies to search for data on subjects of interest to them. A critical element of APIS is the unification of all the existing (and those to be created) catalogs by converting them for public consultation into a single format (US-MARC AMC). As mentioned earlier, several thousand new records will be added to APIS during Phase 3.

APIS is thus part of the growing riches available over the information superhighway to all those connected to it. Because it draws on existing standards rather than creating idiosyncratic data structures or access methods, it has maximum transparency for the user. Its methodology is described further below.

Because of the uniqueness of the materials involved, the entireties of these collections are obvious candidates for a preservation and access project. The APIS project envisages ultimately preserving, recording and cataloging all the of the pertinent materials in all these collections. Several collections (Columbia, Duke, Princeton, Yale) have already completed conservation work with NEH support during the first two Phases of the project. But a lot remains to be done in Michigan, Berkeley, and the new partner institutions.

Michigan's collection is very large, but as indicated above, has already benefited considerably from pre-APIS attention. As of this date of the project, an additional 1,100 papyri have been treated systematically as part of Michigan's costsharing. Conservation has proceeded—and will continue similarly—in tandem with cataloging and before imaging to secure good quality reproductions. This continues in Phase 3, with an estimated 400 more papyri to be treated.

At Berkeley, similarly, the size of the collection has precluded completion of preservation to date. Attention has focused on the papyri mounted in Vinylite, which were the most at risk of the entire collection, as well as being the most heavily used (because many of them are published). 500 papyri were conserved during the 2-year period of APIS 2 and another 210 during Year 1, Phase 3. Additionally, some 20,000 fragments have been placed in acid-free folders. An additional 530 pieces are expected to be treated during APIS 4.

The collection of Washington University has been rehoused in appropriate archival containers during Year 1, Phase 3. However, the Chicago collections are in great need of conservation attention. Although stored in an environmentally controlled chamber, the conservation status of the papyri at the Oriental Institute is virtually unknown. During APIS 3, staff will survey, assess and make recommendations on the conservation status. Similarly, the Goodspeed collection at the Regenstein Library, desperately needs rehousing as many of the papyri rest on acidic paper backing. Pennsylvania is also in the process of surveying, assessing, and making recommendations of the CJAS collection (the first of the two collections to be cataloged and digitized).

A portion of the papyrus collection at New York University was given basic conservation and largely glassed two decades ago during the work on the International Photographic Archive of Papyri; since that time it has had no curatorial attention and it is in great need of conservation; APIS partners will help establish conservation standards and methodologies during APIS 4. The modest collection at Wisconsin is kept mostly in old glass; the papyri will be transferred on short-term loan to Michigan where expert staff will do the appropriate conservation in tandem with digital capture (see workplans, below). 176 of the Stanford papyri that will be cataloged in APIS 4 will be treated by expert staff at Berkeley (see workplans, below).

Before describing the specific tasks planned in the grant period for which this application is submitted, we give a general account of the main components of the larger system they are part of. A key characteristic of APIS is its modular, scalable character. It is designed so that both new types of information and greater quantities of the existing types can be added. At present the APIS central interface contains all the elements described below. The partner institutions have altogether about 50,000 items of which about one-eighth has been published to date. The APIS interface consists at present of about 18,632 items (among them several thousand unpublished), plus text, translation, and images for varying smaller number of items, in an integrated system available over the WWW. The system also provides a manual, specifying standards for supplying metadata, including remote image links, dates and personal names cataloging methods, and database design. Currently, the database contains the records from original partner institutions (Columbia, Duke, Princeton, UC Berkeley, U Michigan, and Yale). By the end of APIS 3, it is expected that the number of records will be more than 20,000.

(a) Catalog of papyri and ostraca, in a format acceptable nationally and internationally to bibliographic utilities. This is the heart of the system. The base format used in the central system is the US-MARC record type in its specific version for manuscript collections (AMC), and it uses standard Library of Congress Subject Headings and Art and Architecture Thesaurus index terms. For the most part, these headings do not correspond to traditional papyrological classifications, [8] but substantial additions to these standard repertories of headings have been made and an on-line Thesaurus has been created. The experience gained so far by the original six institutions will allow the new APIS partners to use these subject headings rather than develop their own.

Although the AMC record type was originally designed for collections rather than individual items, it was successfully adapted at Duke for individual papyri with significant content, and it has been adopted also for the central interface. For very small fragments which preserve little information, the time and cost involved in creating individual MARC records is not appropriate, and such records amount to little more than debris in the databases. Such items have been –and will continue to be– cataloged in standard MARC group records. We believe that such a combination of cataloging forms applies the most appropriate form of access to different categories of material.

As mentioned earlier, Duke's collection has already been cataloged using this format, while Michigan's database, after the recent redesigning of the local template, is now closely mapped to US-MARC fields and conversion should be simple when added to the central interface. Yale's in-house electronic catalog contains about 5,000 records; this was converted by Academic Information Systems staff at Columbia into US-MARC format. The records from Berkeley, Columbia and Princeton have all been mapped to this format; Berkeley's in-house database (Access based) has been redesigned so that data migration to the central interface will not time-consuming. All the new partner institutions use either Michigan's (FMPro 5.5) or Berkeley's (Access) templates that are fully compatible with the APIS interface template.

Both published and unpublished objects are included in all of the completed catalogs (Berkeley and Michigan will join this effort in Phase 4), a major breakthrough in access for a field in which unpublished objects have generally been completely unknown outside the home institution. This process takes naturally considerable time especially in the case of the unpublished material.

The Catalog is, by virtue of combination of library subject headings with normal papyrological information, the prime access point to the collections for a wide range of users. Full-text or specific field searching is provided. Individuals with subject interests and librarians with no subject specialization in antiquity will be able to use the standardized subject headings, while (at the other end of the spectrum) scholars already equipped with specific papyrological references are able to go straight to them. Users are also allowed to browse through the holdings of APIS by documentary or literary type, by writing material, and by language. Classroom instruction has profited tremendously in individual institutions. At the University of Michigan, several undergraduate courses in the last few academic year have relied heavily on the Michigan APIS catalog and the APIS interface.

Most of the activity during Phases 1-3 has been connected with the Catalog and the underlying conservation work. This part of APIS has been brought to successful completion at several partner institutions: Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, in addition to Duke. More extensive details about the individual institutional plans is given in the appendices.

The cataloging situation in the new partner institutions has been described above (section 3). All the new partners will produce US-MARC records or a compatible format that will allow automatic conversion during their transfer the central system.

(b) Images of the majority of the papyri that have been cataloged. As digital production continues, several thousand more images will gradually appear both in the central interface site and in the homepages of the individual institutions. Users are allowed to view images at a variety of levels of resolution, ranging from simple thumbnails to jumbo 600 dpi. The APIS partners, as part of their preparations for Phase 2, conducted a study of digital imaging technology, funded by the Commission on Preservation and Access, the report of which was included as Appendix 8 in the APIS 1 application. The conclusions of this study were that true 600 dpi imaging through digital cameras is an appropriate minimum standard for images. For views of the entirety of large documents, 300 dpi images have been captured, but 600 dpi or higher have been used for images of portions of large originals. Papyrologists using these images in conjunction with image enhancement software, have consistently found them much more valuable than traditional photographs, either in black and white or in color, and 600 dpi provides sufficient resolution for almost all purposes. Some papyri or parts of papyri with exceptionally dense information have been captured in higher resolution. These standards are fully in line with national and international standards and will be followed also by the new partner institutions.

During APIS 1, 600 dpi imaging was feasible with the digital cameras that existed then. At that time, we thought that such cameras produced images that would never need replacing, if properly preserved and recopied in the course of time. For larger papyri, however, it was not clear that future advances in imaging technology will not bring considerable advantages. Since then, things have changed and all institutions have taken advantage of the new technologies. Columbia has used from the beginning a Phase One camera that allows direct imaging of up to 7,000 by 7,000 pixels. Michigan has used in the early phases the Kontron camera and, more recently, photographic intermediates, such as 4x5 color photographic transparencies which are scanned with an Imacon film scanner. This combination of alternative image capture media allows large papyri to be captured in a single image. Advanced image viewing functionality, including panning and zooming, is then possible. All the partner institutions have in essence followed the same standard of 600 dpi or scanning of photographic intermediates. Because of the absence of a digital camera, Princeton worked entirely with 35 mm and 4x5 color photographic transparencies, which were digitized by Luna Imaging; Yale's work was similar to that in Michigan, but used an IBM digital camera; and Berkeley used also such a camera. All new partner institutions plan to use similar technologies following the same standards.

All of the collections have existing bodies of photographic negatives made for various purposes in the past. Michigan in particular has many photographs of texts once in Ann Arbor, but now returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. More than a thousand of these photographs have been digitized and accompany the records. In Phase 4, the vast resources of the International Photographic Archive of Papyri (centers in Brussels, Cologne, Oxford, and Urbana) will be brought into APIS by the participation of the Center for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) at Oxford, as mentioned in the section dealing with international APIS partners. The project will need to resolve intellectual property issues connected with images when a wider range of repositories is included, particularly because it will not be possible to impose any standard policies about matters like publication permission on foreign institutions that adopt our standards.

(c) Text documents, drawn from the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. All published documentary texts from all the collections (including the new partners), up to June 30, 1998, are now included in the DDBDP. Almost all the texts (where appropriate) on APIS central have now established links to the proper text of the DDBDP. Substantial work was done before APIS 3 in formulating the syntax and the creation of these links.

It has been our commitment to transfer all of these texts from Beta code into Unicode (or its 32-bit counterpart ISO 10646, depending on software available) at such time as appropriate indexing, searching and word processing software for Unicode text becomes available. A conference in December 1996, funded under contract from the Commission on Preservation and Access, concluded that Unicode was rapidly approaching feasibility except in the Macintosh environment. Some APIS institutions may adopt Unicode during APIS 3, since Word 2000 for PC and Word 2001 for Mac are already available.

Adding languages other than Greek and Latin can be handled by entry in coding, with tagging that allows user software to display the proper font if the user's computer has the font in question. Relatively few of these texts (Arabic, Coptic, and Demotic, in the main) have so far been published, and the limited funding available in the first three Phases for cataloging such material has also contributed to making this a less pressing issue that it had originally been expected to be.

The most essential tool that needs to be linked during Phase 3 are around 26,000 Bibliographic Records, from the BP; this is a rather mechanical process and should not take much time. Contacts are made with Brussels where the project resides to link this tool in Phase 3. As mentioned earlier, the database for the period 1960-1999 was digitized in a joint venture between Columbia and Brussels. The database, maintained in FilerMaker Pro, has been distributed on a CD-ROM together with the HGV of D. Hagedorn. It would ultimately be desirable for the cards of the period 1932-1959, at least of the participating collections, to be entered. These were, however, not provided with subject indexing when originally issued, and their availability with such indexing is thus more difficult. We may look for other ways of covering the pre-1960 bibliography.

Several other tools can, and should, be added and some work was done already in that direction in earlier phases of APIS:

(a) Corrections and republications of texts (including redatings), as noted in the (BL) Berichtigungsliste der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Ägypten (Berlin-Leipzig-Leiden, 1913-) and elsewhere. This eleven-volume set (including one index volume) lists the textual history of papyri and ostraca after their publication. [9] Unique among the documentary disciplines concerned with antiquity, it has been a major element in the progress of papyrology. Before 1995, it existed only in book form; the full digitization of its information (minus redundancies) will be required. This will not mean the entry of the BL itself as a separate element, however, nor even the entry of the information in the form presented there. Rather, published texts in the DDBDP are being corrected and other information added to the bibliographic citations in the BP (see above). A significant part of this work was done at Duke both pre- and in the course of APIS.

(d) Checklist of Editions: The printed editions, along with the other main components of the papyrological literature, are listed, along with the abbreviations commonly used for them, in the Checklist of Editions of Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, originally developed by Bagnall and Oates with other collaborators. The 5^th print edition which contains also Coptic and Demotic material appeared in 2001. As mentioned earlier, this tool is available on-line and can be embedded into APIS to help users identify abbreviations in the scholarly literature.

APIS has already made significant contributions to digital library planning and development at both the host and at partner institutions. In many respects APIS may be considered as a model project in the way it has identified and then addressed the significant issues that face any similar multi-institutional digital library collaboration. Some of these issues, and their implications for current and future phases of APIS, follow.

Imaging standards. Partner institutions have gained substantial experience in identifying the most effective ways to digitize papyri and ostraca. Technologies and standards are fast-moving in this field, however, so project participants have had to continue to assess and apply new technologies (e.g., successive generations of digital cameras; new, higher-resolution flat-bed scanners) at the same time that they have had to integrate and display images created with earlier (i.e., 3-5 years old) digital technologies. The opportunities and issues presented by constantly improving scanning and image processing technologies are the same as those faced by any multi-year, scanning project, particularly ones involving unique, artifactual objects for which repeated, wholesale re-scanning with new technologies is not feasible or desirable. APIS Phase 4 will include new efforts to understand and address this issue, consulting with staff from other digital library projects and disseminating information about approaches adopted for APIS.

Distributed image database. APIS Phases 1-2 successfully implemented consistent and fully integrated access to images stored at six partner institutions: Berkeley, Columbia, Duke, Michigan, Princeton, and Yale. This substantial task entailed creating detailed "structural metadata" (URLs, size, resolution information, tiling information, captions), for each image derivative and loading it into the central APIS database. Almost immediately the project faced the inevitable and consequent task of keeping image links current in the context of changing local institutional data management practices. As a result, the project adopted the policy of recommending that current participants implement persistent image naming conventions (e.g., PURLs, name resolvers, handle servers, etc.) as soon as feasible; and that new participants be required to have this functionality in place prior to data loading.

Metadata 'harvesting.' The heart of APIS is the central, composite metadata database, comprising cataloging from each of the participants. Despite progress in metadata standards since the beginning of APIS, metadata conventions for rare and specialized material are not yet well-developed—much less standardized nationally or internationally—such that they can be used "out of the box" by projects like APIS. Existing standards such as MARC21 are simply not granular or flexible enough for papyrological metadata; Dublin Core, even as qualified, represents a minimalist approach to metadata that is wholly inadequate for rare and specialized materials.

The APIS project has attempted, successfully for the most part, to accommodate the specialized cataloging data elements needed for papyri and ostraca while at the same time meeting the broader need for standardization, compatibility and functional integration with other digital library resources. The approach taken in this project—well-worth noting in the broader digital library context—was to begin with MARC21, since it is the most detailed bibliographic data dictionary available, and then extend it in ways needed by the project into an—APIS Data Dictionary." The APIS data elements can readily be mapped back into the less granular MARC format if needed for contribution to other projects, but APIS itself is not limited by the constraints of MARC.

The APIS Data Dictionary and accompanying SQL database schema are documented and available via the APIS project web page, at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/ projects/apis/ for others to consult, comment on, or use. It may be useful as part of subsequent phases of the project to propose changes to the MARC format in order to make it more hospitable to such specialized cataloging, thereby availing the papyrological and manuscript communities of the broad systems and software infrastructure that supports MARC.

As with imaging, APIS has had to address the issue of how to integrate variable styles and levels of contribution into a single coherent database. Despite efforts at standardization, APIS partner metadata inevitably reflects different cataloging traditions, variable use of standard subject thesauri, divergent levels of detail, etc. In phases 1 and 2, the APIS participants' cataloging conventions and practices for papyri were still sufficiently diverse to require significant scripted and manual data editing prior to loading into the central APIS file. By Phase 3, the APIS Data Dictionary was fully implemented and incorporated into Berkeley's and Michigan's data capture software, so that their future data contributions would load without additional editing. Moreover, new participants are now able to use these data capture applications (in MS Access and Filemaker Pro, respectively) for their own metadata creation if they do not already have system support locally for specialized metadata collection. Thus cataloging and image metadata may now be contributed to APIS in one of four ways: MARC21, Berkeley and Michigan data capture applications, or the APIS Interface Format—a flat-file data contribution format based on the APIS Data Dictionary.

More recent metadata standards & technologies, such as the OAI ("Open Archives Initiative") standard and the METS ("Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard") initiative, hold great promise for projects like APIS.

SGML/XML DTDs are another possible approach to encoding digital library metadata that may be useful in the future, although the software and other toolsets necessary to make best use of these is still immature and not widely available.

APIS's goal of providing integrated access to cataloging, images, translations and transcriptions of papyri in major U.S. collections is now near realization. As discussed above, metadata from participants can now readily be accepted and integrated into the central metadata file. Links to images are in the process of being converted to 'persistent URLs' to preserve the integrity of the database into the future. The central database now also accommodates translations when provided by partner institutions.

The goal of providing a level of integration and interoperability with other related resources has also been addressed in Phases 2 and 3 by the creation and incorporation of linkages to the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP) as well as to resources at participants' local institution.

DDBDP Linkage. As part of Phase 2, conventions for linking at the APIS item level to the corresponding DDBDP page were identified and documented. After some testing, it was found that a large percentage of such links could be programmatically generated from information already present in participants' cataloging data.

These links were then generated and displayed in the APIS interface so that users could move seamlessly from an APIS item description and image to the DDBDP's transliteration of the same document and any contextual information provided in the Duke Databank. This task, while largely successful, points up the need for those producing scholarly resources and research tools to provide "hooks," as it were, within their systems to allow other systems to access them at the most relevant level. If providers enable this type of linking, publish the linking protocol/syntax, and keep the protocol/syntax consistent over time, it will allow others doing cataloging and developing research tools to build such links in to their projects from the beginning. Following this principle, the APIS site itself now includes detailed information on how to link to it from other systems.

Reverse Links to Home Institutions. The second type of functional integration developed in APIS consisted of "reverse links" to participants' own local systems, where alternative and in some cases more detailed or current information is sometimes available for items in the central APIS database.

This type of 'layered' approach to access—moving from a central access tool to related or more detailed resources in other systems—is strategy that is increasingly being seen as useful and necessary in the diverse and evolving digital library environment. If future phases of APIS or other digital library initiatives eventually include the digitization of relevant archaeological field notebooks and photographs (e.g. in the case of the excavated papyri of the Michigan and Oriental Institute collections), these types of peer-to-peer linkages may be the best approach to functional integration.

The current APIS system, built upon IBM's enterprise database software "DB2," provides real-time search and retrieval of data as well as a variety of batch-generated browsable listings by name, topic, etc. The search system provides full keyword access to the metadata, along with the ability to narrow searches to names, titles, summaries, citations and bibliography numbers, provenance and translation.

As with any search and retrieval system, particular one that is accessed via the web, changes and adjustments continue to be needed based on user feedback, use log analysis, and comparison with online research tools in other fields.

Funding levels in previous phases have not allowed significant research & development of new techniques for indexing, searching, navigation, etc., as once envisioned. However, key APIS partner institutions, including Columbia, which currently acts as the project's "technology host," are members of the Digital Library Federation and have, as well, vigorous local digital library programs. In this context, incremental improvements can continue to be made to the APIS search and retrieval system. In Phase 4 we are requesting funding for some needed infrastructure enhancements that, while not R&D, would nonetheless allow us to take advantage of newer technologies and products – such as the MrSid multi-resolution, zoomable image compression format, and the Luna Insight image presentation software and toolkit.

As with many project-based digital resource initiatives, APIS must now begin to look carefully at issues relating to scalability, sustainability and portability. In Phase 4 priority will be given to these tasks along with the continuing ongoing task of digitization and cataloging of papyri. In part this will be addressed organizationally by the creation of an ongoing governance structure. The following questions of technology and infrastructure will also be investigated:

Response time. As the database grows in size and, moreover, competes with other applications on the host institution's systems and networks, a fast and stable response time must be guaranteed. New ways to provide fast text-based searching will also be explored.

7 x 24 availability. In Phase 2 APIS was provided with a basic level of 7x24 support by the technology host institution, such that any hardware or software disruption occurring at any time would be remedied in real time by computer-center staff. Other types of problems, however, are still only addressed during normal business hours with limited staff assigned on a priority basis to APIS and other digital library applications. A determination will be made as to whether this level of support is adequate or whether additional support is needed.

Software & schema migration. Although hardware migration of the central APIS database will occur automatically as part of the technology host institution's infrastructure, migrating the database to newer releases and generations of the database system and APIS schema will need to be addressed specifically for the APIS project. With the current rate of infrastructure change, APIS will need to expect this type of migration every 3-5 years.

Image derivative migration. Newer generations of image compression (MrSid, JPEG2000, etc.) and display software will allow the original APIS digital masters (tiffs) to be reconverted into higher-resolution and more functional displays. Not only would this be of enormous benefit to scholars and researchers, it would also improve response time for large displays and contribute to the project's portability (i.e., if implemented on a central derivative server). These options will be explored as part of Phase 4.

Portability. Although Columbia is currently acting as technology host for APIS, long-term sustainability of the project requires that the possibility of migration to other systems is incorporated into current system design and implementation. Phase 4 of APIS will work towards this goal by creating a METS-based output conversion program and by publishing the APIS SQL schema.

Portability is also critical if APIS is to be made available in parallel in other environments, such as the RLG Cultural Materials database. If the APIS governing group determines this is desirable, then the system needs to allow for this. Similarly, if there is the need to create mirror sites for the data (e.g., for European partners), portability will also be highly desirable.

Preservation. The long-term preservation of digital originals must be planned for. The governing group and partner institutions will take on this investigation during Phase 4.

The project is conceived as a follow up to the previous APIS Phases and as a two year effort. Detailed statement about work completed in Year 1, Phase 3 and planned for APIS 4 is given in Appendices 4-11, the individual institution work plans and the central APIS interface. In the two-year period for which we apply, in summary the project will focus on the following:

Central interface: The technology component of APIS Phase 4 will consist primarily of support for data conversion and loading into the central APIS database. The improvements implemented in Phases 2 and 3 in the metadata contribution process (e.g., by implementation of a standard data dictionary and interface format, and the upgrades of the Berkeley and Michigan local microcomputer-based metadata creation systems) will make this a more routine process than previously. Yet the increased number of participants will require continuing centralized staff support for data analysis, conversion and loading into APIS master database. Further, we anticipate the need for periodic refreshment of metadata already contributed by Phase 2-3 partners, as local image locations and file and name-resolution strategies change and as additions and corrections are made to catalog records. The technology host institution will also need, during Phase 4, to make incremental system and software upgrades and improvements to stay current with evolving digital library standards and Columbia's local technology environment.

As part of this phase's attempt to address the issue of 'sustainability,' including a governance structure, project oversight, financial support, and outreach to European partners, it is important to plan and implement several additional types of enabling technologies and strategies.

As in many other current projects involving the creation of digital resources, concerns about long term preservation and archiving are becoming more pressing. In the case of APIS, institutions and granting agencies have invested enormous amounts of time, energy and money to create high-quality digital versions of papyri. In many cases this may be the last time these papyri are ever able to be digitized, either for reasons of cost or material fragility. We therefore must try to develop a concrete strategy—in conjunction with our partner and other institutions—for the archiving and digital preservation of these images and metadata over the coming decades.

As part of Phase 4, we will explore options both current and on the near horizon for archiving APIS images and metadata. During this phase we would expect to bring to the APIS governing body a set of realistic options and action items. The implementation of a digital archiving plan will be facilitated by the prior project to reconvert Tiffs to MrSIDs, which will entail obtaining physical access to all existing Tiffs.

The DDBDP has become a weak link in the distributed online papyrological research environment of which APIS is now a significant part. A strategic plan for addressing this will be developed during this phase of the project. Options might include: working with the current host institution collaboratively to develop and enhance the current system; migrating the project to a different or parallel host institution; incorporating the DDBDP knowledge base as a component of APIS; etc.

Berkeley: over the two year period catalog 400 papyri housed in acid-free folders and the remaining 150 oversize (mounted mostly in plastic); all 530 papyri will be treated by the conservator; scan all 400 papyri in folders using a one pass scanner; the oversized papyri will be captured with a large-format digital camera; additionally, Berkeley will collaborate with Stanford (see below) to include their collections in APIS; Berkeley will be responsible for hosting the catalog records in their database and also perform conservation and digital capture of 176 Stanford papyri.

Chicago: complete identifying all objects comprising papyrological collections of the OI Museum, as well as ostraca and other associated documents; continue entering data on established data base; digitize, by scanning or other means, photographs of ancient documents as well as such photographic (and other) documentation as may currently exist; survey, assess, and make recommendations on the conservation status of the ancient documents .

Duke: maintenance and upgrading of the DDBDP, particularly addition and proofreading of recently published volumes; refreshing the records of the Duke Papyrus Archive; pursue further the joint Duke/Oxford Project on the DDBDP and the literary papyri.

Michigan: Conservation, cataloging and digital capture of the 87 papyri from the Wisconsin collection and of about 800 unpublished texts from the Michigan/Cornell collections.

Pennsylvania: upon completion of work on the papyri at the CJS, begin cataloging, conservation and digital capture of the papyri at the Museum; classify texts according to language, and genre.

New York University: preservation assessment by visiting (external) conservator; planning for conservation and digital capture at the recommendation of the conservator; set up and configuration of local database using the Michigan or Berkeley template; basic cataloging of approximately 500 papyri; assessment of the collection by visiting papyrological consultant; experimentation with digital capture.

Stanford: cataloging of 176 documents; the rest of the work will take place at Berkeley (see above).

Washington University: begin implementation of structured conservation protocol; implement a structured process for the descriptive cataloging and create records for some of the published texts; provide digital surrogates of the papyri.

Wisconsin: the collection of 87 papyri will be conserved, digitized, and conserved by Michigan (see above).

Yale: no funding requested; creation of digital images and refreshment of records with internal funding.

The project will be operated under a grant to the University of Michigan, which will, apart from the work on its own papyrus collection, provide management services and assistance to all the new partner institutions. The central interface is under the responsibility of Columbia University. The work at the partner institutions will be carried out by subcontracts to those institutions from Michigan, except for Wisconsin and Stanford; the latter will operate under subcontract from Berkeley. The details of what will be done at each institutions are provided in their plans of work in Appendixes 4-11. [10]

A central concern of any project like this must be quality control. Each component of APIS brings somewhat different issues of quality control. Our general approach has been to try to insure initial quality as far as possible, but we recognize that no system is proof against slips. Details of how each institution will carry out checks are provided in their work plans, but a few general principles that have already been followed before and during Phases 1 and 2 can be set out here.

Text: the largest part of the DDBDP was proofread by papyrologists at Michigan, volume by volume, separately from the data entry at Duke. The new volumes are entered (if not already in electronic form) and proofread at Duke. Usage has shown that the error rate in the corrected texts is extremely low, and remaining errors are corrected as reported.

Bibliography: The BP was proofread at Columbia after data entry, and a second reading has been given at Brussels, the source of the original cards. The Brussels office is responsible for continuing file maintenance and correction, taking advantage also of any corrections reported by users. It will periodically provide corrected versions to APIS.

Images: The principles of quality control for electronic imaging are discussed in the report to the Commission in Preservation and Access included in the application for APIS 1. These are in part mechanical and in part a matter of checking of the images by papyrologists for correct identity, tagging, fidelity to original shortly after their creation. As substantial imaging has taken place during the first two Phases, the procedures will be useful for all the new partner institutions.

Catalog records: The papyrologists in charge at each institution check the papyrological content of each record for any evident problems after it is created by the staff papyrologist. It is checked for conformity to cataloging rules by the library cataloger responsible for adding subject headings and completing the US-MARC record.

Two quite separate, though related, questions must be addressed here. The first is the availability of the original papyri. Most collections have been extremely protective of the originals, and the APIS partners are among them. In general, access is restricted to those with appropriate professional training and sufficient knowledge of the materials to use them without damaging them. Library and faculty curatorial staff generally share the responsibility of controlling access. These policies are not likely to change, although proper glassing of unglazed material should make future use of the papyri by students and others less damaging to the original artifacts. In any case, what is absolutely certain is that different institutions have different policies about access. Current policies will themselves no doubt evolve, but as additional institutions become part of APIS their policies will also have to be respected. It has not been part of our intention to impose one particular policy on the entire world of papyrus collections. The system is therefore building in the capability of providing different levels of access on a document-by-document basis.

Access to images of the papyri, however, is a different matter. Up to now, most collections have tended to provide photographs of unpublished papyri only to those to whom they would give permission to use the originals, and only ability to be physically present at a collection site has distinguished these groups of users. The electronic image availability over the Internet is gradually changing the situation for both published and unpublished texts. Published texts are now freely accessible via image, catalog records, and text in the original language (Greek and Latin), far more freely than constraints of physical safety of the objects would allow the originals to be. Unpublished texts, which have for the most part been both inaccessible and even unknown to all except collection staff, are gradually becoming available as well; this group of documents will grow dramatically in Phase 4. APIS has in fact served as an engine for change in the direction of opening up unpublished material to a much larger public. Where cataloging and imaging are completed, this opening up has been occurring as a natural byproduct. Although individual collections may for a time wish to reserve publication rights to particular texts for students, faculty, or other scholars, the vast bulk—and in some cases all—of these images will nonetheless be available to all who wish to consult them. Duke, the first collection to bring up on-line images of its full collection, has adopted such a policy of universal access. Other collections, such as Yale and Columbia, are following the same path, and the larger collections, such as Berkeley and Michigan, will follow in Phase 4, once they complete cataloging their published objects.

Many existing electronic tools in classical studies are distributed on CD-ROMs or, until recently, even on floppy disks, and are used on local microcomputers. In recent years, however, this has been changing: at present, the Perseus Project, the DDBDP, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), and the HGV are distributed both on CDs and on-line. The scale of APIS is unlikely to permit distribution of the entire central repository on CDs in the near term, particularly given the volume of stored images and the patchwork of access regulations governing them. The primary method of access is therefore on the WWW. As with various other recently-developed tools over the Internet, usage requires client software on the user's workstation for some operations, particularly in manipulating images and the display of Greek characters. Users need workstations of significant power, but the requisite level of computing power has continued to decline in cost in the past several years since the beginning of APIS and will undoubtedly continue to do so. At the same time, newer and faster hardware and software has been produced as well as faster and better Internet connectivity. As with other tools, versions of the software are available for the Macintosh and high-end Windows systems. Optimum use of APIS is achieved (as for other sites with high quality graphics) with direct network connection by the users, but software tools for access to the WWW are changing so rapidly that specifying any particular one here would be pointless. The improvement in the last few year of tools for telephone and domestic cable connection to the Internet means that full and speedy access to APIS can be available to home users with appropriate hardware and software.

A distributed form of use will also be readily possible because of the capabilities of the newer WWW tools to extract subsets of the database for use on local machines. A researcher going into the field with an archaeological expedition, for example, could choose from the database all papyri and ostraca of the third and fourth centuries, storing images only of a sample (e.g. on a set of CDs) useful for palaeographical analysis, thus creating a personalized database suited to the most immediate needs while away from network access. In fact, the entirety of ONLY the catalog records from all collections (NOT images) along with the DDBDP can be copied on just one CD!

Broadening public and educational access to the papyri will require some specific steps beyond those that will provide availability to scholars. We have linked to a few resources designed for general users and we will continue this effort, to provide a less technical route into the resources of APIS. The Michigan collection, for instance, has created ten basic subject headings with several sub-categories for each subject, with brief explanations and links to catalog records and images; such a tool can, at some stage, be developed through the central APIS site.

Here again there is a dual question: the artifacts and their intellectual contents. Where photographic negatives are created (in most institutions only of the larger pieces), these will be placed in the National Underground Storage facility; [11] copy negatives will be maintained in the institutions. For the rest, the contents are electronic files of considerable bulk. These are—and will be—backed up in the originating institution using standard academic computing procedures and in the same manner that the institution backs up similar materials like the library catalog. Further protection is provided by distribution of copies of the data to the central interface site where they are backed and only derivatives are used.

The partners in APIS are indeed aware of the need to be certain that these large electronic files are not left behind when new generations of mass storage devices are adopted. It is impossible to predict such developments with any accuracy. Rather, all the partner institutions will provide for this migration through two mechanisms: first, treating the contents of APIS like other critical components of the institution's digital existence; and second, continuing consultation among the partners (under the aegis of the American Society of Papyrologists) to ensure compatibility among the institutions.

The original papyri will remain in the pertinent sections of the partner institutions (mostly in their corresponding libraries).

(a) Michigan built (before APIS) a highly sophisticated separate storage chamber for the papyrus collection, western manuscripts (on parchment and paper) and Islamic manuscripts. The same chamber houses also the Cornell collection of papyri.

(b) Duke's papyri are kept in the vaults of the Special Collections Library.

(c) Columbia's papyri are kept in the vaults of the Special Collections Library. The areas in question will be air-conditioned as part of the renovation of Butler Library which is well under way and should be completed by 2003.

(d) Yale's papyrus collection is housed in a climate-controlled vault in the Beinecke Library and protected by a non-aqueous fire suppression system. The mounted items are shelved horizontally in acid-free folders within archival boxes.

(e) Berkeley: The papyri are now kept in vault created 4 years ago, in the middle and most secure area of the Bancroft Library.

(f) Princeton has a climate-controlled storage chamber in Firestone Library which now houses also the papyri.

(g) University of Pennsylvania: 150 papyri are kept in CJS and more than 1,500 at the University's Museum together with all the other collections.

(h) The Washington University Papyri are stored in Olin Library Special Collections.

(i) The University of Chicago's papyrus collections are kept in two different facilities: the Goodspeed papyri are housed in the Department of Special Collections at the Regenstein Library; the Oriental Institute papyri and ostraca are housed in the new state of the art climate-controlled research and storage facilities of the OI Museum.

(j) The papyri at the Department of Classics at Stanford are kept in one archival box, while those in the Special Collections are kept in three archival boxes.

(k) The Wisconsin papyri are kept together with other rare manuscripts in the Special Collections Library.

(l) The New York University papyrus collection is housed in the Special Collections Department of Bobst Library, NYU's main research library.

Although APIS is primarily concerned with carrying out actual work in preservation and access, it will also have a research component, which will be developed in Phase 4. There is, after all, much we do not know at this stage. We cannot answer in advance, for instance, how much electronic access in a hypertext system will change user demand for particular types of information. We cannot at this point tell what curve of user demand over the network to anticipate. Data from individual collections (Berkeley, Duke, and Michigan) indicate that users are interested equally in catalog records and in images. As mentioned earlier, papyrologists in Europe have already begun publication of papyri in US collections, especially at Duke. A particular point of interest will be the structure of individual work sessions, which will tell us much about how patterns of scholarly investigation are changed by the availability of APIS and similar systems. APIS will benefit from the research and evaluation capability established for the digital libraries to assess these questions. The results of this evaluation will then help provide more efficient access to APIS in the future.

A special part of this effort will be the logging and study of public usage of the generalist homepage briefly described in section 12 above. The existing homepages of individual institutions have indeed become important resources for primary, secondary and tertiary education; links to these papyrological homepages can often be found in K-12 resources. In the future, we hope to learn what types of access work best for the non-specialist user of the papyri and how to broaden our efforts to make the material more available outside scholarly circles. Overall, however, judging from the experience of the central interface and the individual institutions, access to both the homepages and the actual collections has increased dramatically over the past few years.

The project was initially developed by a group of papyrologists convened by Roger S. Bagnall in his role as President of the American Society of Papyrologists (ASP) and received early encouragement from NEH staff involved with the earlier Duke project. Subsequent phases brought a wide range of rare book and manuscript curators, preservation librarians, library systems staff, academic information systems specialists, library management, and conservators into the discussions and the materialization of the actual project. The present application reflects this broad range of the various parties involved; the work plans and the budgets in particular list the personnel in each institution and describe their duties.

In 2000, Traianos Gagos, in his capacity as senior papyrologist at the University of Michigan (after Ludwig Koenen's retirement on June 30, 2000) and Vice-President of the ASP at the time, succeeded Bagnall as Project Director. Gagos is now the President of the ASP and he will continue to direct APIS in Phase 4. For nearly 14 years Gagos has participated in several capacities in the creation of the DDBDP and, between 1991-1993, he with Koenen developed the hybrid principles of what was later to become APIS. [12]

We are under no illusion that managing an over ten-institution project (Princeton and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have completed their projects and participate without budget in this phase; Yale will continue with internal funding) is simple, particularly without a high-overhead central institutional management. The procedures in place in Phases 1-3 have worked fairly well, although the award budgets did not allow sufficient funds to always allow regular meetings. The University of Michigan will undertake to act as project manager, with the funds for the other institutions provided through subcontracts. Direct central intervention in local operations will thus be minimized. This practice is in accordance with the fundamental philosophy of APIS, which is to ensure compatibility and interoperability of results but not to micromanage local routes to achieving these. The elements of our consortial arrangements are as follows:

(1) A Steering Committee composed of two representatives from each partner institution. This body will, as in the past, communicate in the main by electronic means, but the budget provides for two meetings. Our experience in developing the project is that such face-to-face meetings are important to deal with common issues. A list of its members is given in Appendix 12. In Year 2 of APIS 3, however, we will try to create a more formal organizational structure that will consist of an Executive Committee of 5 that will be elected by all partner institutions, which replace the older scheme.

(2) An electronic list of all parties involved in the project, by means of which communications can reach not only those on the Steering Committee but all others concerned. This list was created during Phase 1 and has been updated to include the new partners (l-apis@umich.edu) and facilitated early on the study of imaging and the preparation of the various proposals to NEH greatly. It is our main means of internal communication on matters of general interest. Sublists and local lists for the academic and technical staff are also used for more communications on more specific issues.

(3) A Steering Committee in each institution, responsible for coordinating work locally. These are responsible, working with the local project director, for ensuring that the individual subcontracts are carried out.

(4) A larger group of advisers who have contributed and continue to contribute their diverse expertise to the project; the list of these is also given in Appendix 13.

Details of staffing at the individual institutions are given in the work plans (Appendices 4-11).

During Phase 4 we will implement an entirely new governance structure. At this writing, the main principles of this structure have been circulated to partners for comment, and we anticipate that the new structure will be operative by the start of Phase 4 or early in that phase. We expect to move to a smaller steering committee with rotating membership and to produce formal conditions of participation for all institutions.

[1] See " http://millennium.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/lhpc/collections_images/045_Bingen.jpg".

[2] The Perseus Project has linked extensive resources for classical Greece in a CD-ROM and videodisk package (it includes Greek text, translations, a dictionary, maps, photographs, and reference information, all joined with hypertext links) and a web version (www.perseus.tufts.edu). Perseus has made major contributions to making some of the raw materials of APIS available over the Internet during Phase 1. During APIS 2, Perseus in co-operation with Duke University became the home of the on-line version of the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP); see below, section 3.

[3] A good example is M. Pantelia's "Electronic Resources for Classicists: The Second Generation", available both in print and in electronic form at: http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~tlg/index/indexes.html; for archaeology, one of the most popular sites is in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan (created and maintained by S. Heath): http://rome.classics.lsa.umich.edu/welcome.html; for the ancient Near East, visit the server of the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago), maintained by Chuck Jones: http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/

ABZU.HTML. All these sites list resources that are intended primarily for experts and active scholars.

[4] See http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/

[5] For a description, see D. Hagedorn, "Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens," Datenbanken in der Alte Geschichte, ed. M. Fell et al. (= Computer und Antike 2, St. Katharinen 1994) 226-231.

[6] M. Fackelmann, Die Restaurierung von Papyrus und anderen Schriftträgern aus Ägypten. Studia Amstelodamensia ad epigraphicam, ius antiquum et papyrologicam pertinentia 24 (Zupthen 1985).

[7] The project of the restoration and publication of these rolls is co-directed by Frösén and Ludwig Koenen. Traianos Gagos is the co-director of the Michigan part of that project.

[8] See P. van Minnen's article in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 31 (1994) 159-70.

[9] By "textual history" we mean corrections to readings and interpretations, redatings, and other discussions of the texts.

[10] Staff time has throughout been calculated on the basis of 210 working days or 1300 net available hours a year (not including professional meetings), and in productivity estimates an allowance has been made of about 5 percent for training.

[11] National Underground Storage, Boyers, Pennsylvania, provides archival quality storage in accord with national standards. The vaults have environmental conditions which meet ANSI IT9.11 standards. Temperature is kept below 70 degrees and the relative humidity is maintained at 25% plus or minus 5%. Many research libraries, including Michigan, routinely store all preservation microfilm, photographic negatives, and other environmentally sensitive materials which require long-term preservation at National Underground Storage.

[12] See T.Gagos, "Scanning the Past: A Modern Approach to Ancient Culture," Library Hi-Tech 14.1, issue 53 (1996) 11-22. Id., "The University of Michigan Papyrus Collection: Current Trends and Future Perspectives," in Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (Florence 2001) 511-37.