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[APIS NEH
GRANT PROPOSAL, 2005-2007] NARRATIVE
1. Introduction This application requests support for the continuation and major development 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, original language 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. It has now become a fully international project, encompassing almost all North American papyrus collections of substantial size and several of the major European institutions. As the project has developed, an increasing proportion of the funding for the addition of content has of necessity come from this widely-distributed group of institutional partners, with the funding provided by NEH concentrated on the technological and consortial core of the project.
We now seek funding for a further two year period (July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2007) during which this trend will be intensified. By the end of this period ("APIS 5"), virtually all North American holdings will be included in the APIS metadata, except for part of the unpublished papyri in Berkeley and Michigan. The scale of those collections makes their complete capture a very long-term project, in which the bulk of the funding has come and will come from institutional sources. In addition, and even more importantly, APIS 5 will see a major move toward making APIS a truly comprehensive research environment for papyrology, working in cooperation with all of the international research tool projects in the field. The major part of the cost of this development will come from private funds. During this period also we expect to build an international governance structure for this "APIS-plus" system based on the one developed for APIS during Phase 4. Details on all of these points are given below.
A distinctive characteristic of APIS, developed gradually and with much effort, is its collectively implemented set of standards for imaging, for data 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 technology evolves. The first version of 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 APIS 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 beginning in 1996, APIS has set an example to other disciplines of what is possible in a world of constantly evolving technologies. In its early phases it also brought a renewal of interest in two of the participating collections. This energizing effect was also 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 begin to 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 continuing inclusion of new partners 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 gives an impression of the vast possibilities. Substantial work has been under way to improve the system and make it more user-friendly, and we will move during Phase 5 to take advantage of far more powerful image manipulation and interface software.
2. Significance of the Papyri and the APIS Project 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 epigrams of Posidippus, 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 just a decade 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 participating American collections, described below, are collectively of great international importance, representing around 98% of the American holdings of such documents, with more than 50,000 items. APIS is thus now literally becoming 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 American 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] In Phases 3 and 4, seven institutions that house smaller collections 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); New York University; Stanford; the University of Toronto; and the University of Wisconsin. Together these institutions hold more than 5,000 papyri and ostraca. For details about the distinctive histories and strengths of the American participant institutions see Appendix 2.
On the international level, several important European collections committed to joining APIS in earlier Phases. 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 had also expressed strong interest in joining APIS. However, Vienna did not receive the funding needed to begin the project. The Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg has faced delays due to internal administrative complications, and Giessen has lost its curator. But, all these institutions intend to follow the APIS standards once funding and personnel allows them to begin their projects. Despite delays in these institutions, there has been good progess in other collections: the University of Toronto has already contributed images and data to APIS from one of its collections; the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, is producing images at the time of the writing of this grant of some 60-70 papyri that have not been accessible to scholars for more than 80 years; and two representatives from the Oslo collection visited the University of Michigan for consultations on cataloging, preservation, and digital capture standards. Oslo has already produced 50 experimental metadata records using the Michigan FMPro template and digital images. With minor adjustments, this material should be ready for transfer to APIS by the end of 2004. A consortial project, parallel to APIS, in Germany that aims to catalog the papyrus collections in Halle, Jena, and Leipzig is also considering of joining APIS in Phase 5. In fact, this project has followed very closely the APIS standards, since it has used one of the two templates developed for data entry by US partners. Finally, it should be noted that the Herculaneum Papyri Project which focuses on the publication of a very large number of carbonized papyrus rolls containing literature from Herculaneum's Villa dei Papiri, will join APIS in Phase 5. This decision was reached through a joint agreement between the Harold B. Lee Library at Bringham Young University, the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (ISPART) of BYU, and the Italian Biblioteca Nazionale "Vittorio Emanuelle III" di Napoli. Realizing the dynamic impact of APIS as a research and instructional too, the directors of the Herculaneum papyri, will use APIS as the main repository for their metadata; the images will reside in BYU and in Naples. 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.
In Phase 4 of APIS, Oxford has also completed a project not related to its own collections that contributes substantially to the rich resources of APIS: the digitization of thousands of photographs of papyri in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo taken in past decades by the International Photographic Archive of Papyri. This digitization and the creation of relevant metadata have been carried out by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) thanks to a major grant from the Mellon Foundation. This project alone contributes some 8,000 new images and basic records to APIS, bringing the total to over 33,000 records (up from approximately 19,000 at the end of Phase 3).
3. Background and Previous History of this Project 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—apart from APIS itself—in electronic form 100 percent of the published texts of Greek and Latin documentary papyri and ostraca through the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), available 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 Greek and Latin papyrus documents (51,650 records till May 2002), the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis (HGV, with 53,736 records as of April 30, 2004, available on CD in a 2000 version and constantly updated on the web at www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~gv0/ gvz.html)[5]; and a complete electronic version of recent bibliography (1960-2004) through the files of the Bibliographie Papyrologique (BP).
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 (http://perswww.kuleuven.ac.be/~u0013314/mythog.htm ) and the Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri (http://cpp.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/searchform.html ). Work is still in progress on the Chicago Demotic Dictionary Project that has both text and images for cursive late Egyptian. All letters completed to date are now available also on-line (http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/ DEM/Demotic.html). The Leuven prosopographical project Prosopographia Ptolemaica is now available in digital form. A variety of projects in Demotic, Coptic, and Arabic papyrology have been proposed or underway.
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 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 4, 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 4 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 4.
CENTRAL SYSTEMS WORK
At present, the central APIS database (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/apis/) contains over 23,000 catalog records with links to over 45,000 unique images. Major improvements were made to the central search system and interface during APIS 4. We rewrote the APIS search and retrieval application and load programs to achieve efficiencies in ingesting metadata from APIS partners. We migrated the APIS master file from the original database schema (Columbia's Master Metadata File version #1) to the newer version of the schema that provides improved structural metadata. We revised the original search interface based on feedback from 2+ years of experience with scholars, researchers and other types of users. These enhancements included faster & more powerful keyword searching and better display and navigation of results. Before the end of the APIS 4 period, additional work will be completed on providing enhanced full text indexing and display, and METS output capability.
INDIVIDUAL INSTITUTIONS Detailed information about the work accomplished in previous phases by the American institutional partners is given in Appendix 4.
4. Condition of the Materials 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 led the conservation effort for the carbonized rolls found in 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. A new revised version of this guide has been produced recently by Leyla Lau-Lamb, the Papyrus Conservator at the University of Michigan (for a draft, see Appendix 5). This will be made available to all the partner institutions by the end of summer 2004. 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.
Major 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 the continuation of this work plays only a minor role in Phase 5, information on conservation work accomplished in Phases 1-3, and underway in Phase 4, is given in Appendix 6.
5. Access to Collections and Bibliographic Control The once-significant historic differences among the partners in this project have been diminished substantially by APIS. The history of the collection management of the major partners is detailed in Appendix 7. Today, thanks to Endowment support and local investments, all of them provide primary bibliographic access and control through the APIS database and local subsets of that database. The metadata for the collections is available to the entire world rather than only to local users. There remains much work to be done on the unpublished materials in the largest collections (Berkeley and Michigan) and in the new partner institutions before every item is available, and of course the work of improving the catalog records is continuous.
In a broader framework, 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 of the APIS database 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. Phase 5 will begin the process of bringing into APIS a deeper array of linked resources, particularly for languages other than Greek and Latin.
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 and data structures are made publicly available on the Columbia web site.
6. Selection for Preservation 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) completed conservation work with NEH support during the first phases of the project. But a lot remains to be done in Michigan, Berkeley, and the newer partner institutions.
Michigan Michigan's collection is very large, but had already benefited considerably from pre-APIS attention. As of this date of the project, a total of approximately 2,000 items were treated by conservation staff. Conservation has proceeded—and will continue similarly—in tandem with cataloging and before imaging to secure good quality reproductions.This will continue in Phase 5, with an estimated 500 items to be treated.
At Berkeley, material for conservation and digitization will be selected based on condition (i.e., papyri most at risk) and instructional and research needs. All pieces selected will be mounted (or, in the case of the few pieces still in Vinylite, remounted) in glass. The conservator will work on the collection year round.
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 5, staff will survey, assess, make recommendations and rehouse papyri of the Goodspeed collection at the Regenstein Library, which 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 regarding the CAJS collection, the first 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; Leyla Lau-Lamb, the Michigan conservator, visited the collection in the first year of APIS and made recommendations regarding conservation standards and methodologies. The modest collection at Wisconsin is kept mostly in old glass; the papyri will be transferred on short-term loan to Michigan before July 2004 where expert staff will do the appropriate conservation in tandem with digital capture. At Stanford Prof. Manning and Dr. Hickey will select 75 pieces to be conserved in phase two based on condition and significance (see workplans, below).
7. The Elements of APIS 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. As of April 2004, The APIS image database consists of about 23,000 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 the original partner institutions (Columbia, Duke, Princeton, UC Berkeley, U Michigan, and Yale) as well as approximately 50 records from the University of Toronto. By the end of APIS 4, it is expected that several thousand records for the papyri of the International Photographic Archive (AIP) that are being created in Oxford, as well as papyri from more recent partners (e.g. Washington University) and international partners (e.g. Oslo and the Hermitage) will be added to the central interface. We anticipate that the number of records will be more than 32,000.
APIS includes the following elements: (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 records from some institutions use 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. 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.
All new partner institutions use either Michigan's (FMPro 5.5) or Berkeley's (Access) templates, which are fully compatible with the APIS database, to create new metadata records, thus minimizing the cost and difficulty of adding records to the central database.
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.[9] 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 years have relied heavily on the Michigan APIS catalog and the APIS interface. In 2003-4, the central and local catalogs were used as one of the main instructional tools for undergraduate classes on Graeco-Roman Egypt that were taught at Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, and Oberlin College. Both instructors and students provided useful feeback on technical and subject matter. This trend is bound to continue and expand as more instructors become familiar with the educational potential of APIS.
(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 used the Kontron camera in the early phases 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.
During Phase 4, staff at Berkeley and Michigan conducted a review of recent literature on imaging and studied image quality from newer-generation flatbed scanners. As a result, all partners have agreed that the best of the newer scanners produce image quality comparable to that of digital cameras.
(c) Text documents, drawn from the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. All published documentary texts from all the collections (including the new partners) are now included in the DDBDP, which continues to be updated as new volumes of texts are published. Almost all the texts (where appropriate) on the APIS central interface have now established links to the proper text of the DDBDP.
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. But scholars in these fields are now developing projects comparable to the DDBDP; the most advanced is a Cologne-based Demotic data bank directed by H.-J. Thissen. During Phase 5 we will begin work on planning for linkage to this resource.
Beyond these core elements integrated into APIS during Phases 1-4, there are additional papyrological resources. Plans to bring these into the APIS data structure are discussed briefly in Section 9, below.
8. APIS and Digital Libraries 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.
9. APIS Integration with Other Scholarly Resources 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 2-4 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 into 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.
“APIS-plus”. Thanks to substantial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a Distinguished Achievement Award to APIS's first project director, Roger Bagnall, we plan during 2004-2007 to move actively to realize APIS's original goal, of integrating a wide range of papyrological resources. The exact shape of this extended APIS cannot be fully described at present, because it will depend on discussions at a conference in Leiden in June, 2004, after this application is completed. The basic concept, however, is of an extension of the APIS data structures to include additional elements contributed by partners who have maintained many of the important research tools in papyrology like the Bibliographie Papyrologique, Berichtigungsliste, and HGV. These separate tools would still be able to be produced using these fields, but APIS simultaneously would contain all of the data generated by these projects, fully linked to the central metadata records. See Appendix 8 for fuller information on some of these resources.
10.
APIS System Functionality and User Interface 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 5 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 (or JPEG2000) multi-resolution, zoomable image compression format, and the Luna Insight image presentation software and toolkit.
11. Scalability, Sustainability, Portability 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 5, as 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 continue to be addressed: 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. Columbia has implemented major improvements to response time during the APIS4 period, and continues to monitor and optimize response time as the need arises. 7 x 24 availability. Since Phase 2 APIS has been 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 are addressed during normal business hours with limited staff assigned on a priority basis to APIS and other digital library applications. This level of support has proved adequate for APIS needs and will be continued into the future. 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. The current APIS database scheme is now solid and sustainable into the future. Because of technology developments at Columbia, however, it may be necessary to move APIS from DB2 to Oracle during the APIS 5 period. 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 will 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). Some of these options are being explored in Phase 4, but in Phase 5 we will work to create a Central APIS Tiff Repository and migrate existing images en masse to either MrSID or JPEG2000 format.
Preservation. The long-term preservation of digital originals must be planned for. Discussions began during Phase 4. During Phase 5, we will bring in a consultant to work with us on costing out a concrete preservation strategy, leveraging the Phase 5 investment in a Central Tiff Repository.
12. Plan of Work in Phase 5 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 4 and planned for APIS 5 is given in Appendices 9-**, 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 System Work During the APIS 5 period, no major
enhancements to the core central system will be implemented, although a
migration from the current DB2 system to Oracle may be required because of
developments in Columbia’s technology environment. Instead, our efforts will
turn to enhancing and sustaining the enormous asset represented by APIS’s
digital image collection and testing new technologies that can enhance the use
of APIS by the scholarly community. Central APIS Tiff Repository. It is vital that the intellectual assets represented by the original APIS scans created over the history of the APIS project, along with their associated metadata, be retained for and migrated into the future. To do this, in APIS 5 we will work toward creating a consolidated repository of original tiff images from all the APIS partners and make submission of tiffs to the repository a routine task when adding new partners and sponsoring new imaging.
Creating a Central Tiff Repository will serve a number of vital purposes for APIS partners, scholars, researchers and future users of the material, as follows.
a.
Complete APIS Image Inventory. Creation of the Central Tiff Repository will ensure the
existence of a complete inventory of all APIS images. This is especially
important at this juncture, since most institutions do not yet have an
operational long-term digital archiving plan. Many institutions will in fact
have difficulty even now in reassembling a complete tiff archive of their
‘best’ original APIS scans, which is an indication of the importance of this
effort. As the CDs that APIS tiffs were initially saved to deteriorate or are
lost or mislaid, the digital assets created for APIS will also be dissipated,
leaving scholars and institutions of the future with the job of rescanning the
very same images -- not because of improvements in technology but because of
the unavailability of the original scans. b.
Migration of APIS Derivatives. The existence of a Central Tiff Repository will enable
the migration of image derivatives presented to end users to new image encoding
standards and higher resolution & more highly functional types of image
derivatives. Once the Central Tiff Repository is created and basic asset
management principles applied, we will generate a new set of derivatives using
one of the newer multiresolution, zoomable formats such as MrSid or JPEG2000
and make these versions of images available in addition to or instead of the
older sets of JPEG derivatives now displayed. Although institutions may
choose to continue host images from their own servers, end users may benefit significantly
from a consistent set of derivatives with consistent functionality served from
a central site. c.
Creation of European Mirror Site. The creation of central image server housing a complete
set of APIS image derivatives in a consistent zoomable, multiresolution format
will make it possible finally to a European mirror sites for APIS (images
only). This will be a key component in our effort to engage European and
Middle Eastern institutions in APIS and continue to add their authoritative
holdings for the benefit of scholars here and abroad. Although funds are not
being sought in this proposal to create such a mirror site, it is anticipated
that we will be able to able to find a European partner to host and support
such a site through other funds. d. Long-Term Digital Archiving of APIS Tiffs. The creation of the Central Tiff Repository will also enable us to move concretely to implement a long-term digital archiving plan for APIS. A number of “trusted repository” options are now beginning to become available, including the OCLC Digital Archive, Iron Mountain Digital Services and others. We will retain a consultant for two days to review with the Executive Committee the options available for creating a long-term digital archive for APIS. The consultant will also provide the APIS Executive Committee with descriptions or case studies of other similar projects, as well as information about best practices and various cost models. As part of this task area we will prepare a set of recommendations and circulate them to other institutions nationally and internationally for their information and comment. This should be a significant contribution to the urgent discussion about long-term digital archiving, particularly as it relates to large research tools projects such as APIS, Digital Scriptorium and others.
Columbia, the technology host of APIS, has now acquired the Luna Insight system and during the APIS 4 and initial APIS-Plus projects will undertake a pilot project testing Insight for possible use with APIS. Apart from providing additional image functionality, Insight would also provides a mechanism for direct input into the system (“Inscribe Data Editor”), rather than the batch input mode that has so far been used for APIS. The Inscribe Data Editor will also provide the means for authoritative third party agencies to update and enrich bibliographic and scholarly information in the database, such as translations, references to published descriptions, etc.
In APIS 5, assuming this test goes well, the full APIS database will be migrated into Luna Insight as an alternate platform for access and image research. In addition, the new Insight XML Gateway will be employed to provide higher level integration and presentation of external resources such as the Duke Databank, Project Perseus and other research databases.
The DDBDP was flagged in the Phase 4 application as a weak link in the distributed online papyrological research environment of which APIS is now a significant part. A strategic plan for addressing this was, as promised, developed during Phase 4 by Duke, which has made a major, long-term institutional commitment to sustain this part of the project. More specifically, Duke has began discussions with the Perkins Library about the feasibility of moving the DDBDP's principal home from Perseus to Duke. The Library is fully committed to this enterprise. The expectation is that direct, immediate, and total control of the DDBDP will enhance its capacityfor easy integration with the rest of APIS. However, the move will not be simple, because Perseus uses a constellation of proprietary, open-source, and custom-written software to serve up its materials.
Individual Institutions: Berkeley: over the two year period create at least 2,000 new records. Material for conservation and digitization will be seleected based on condition as well as instructional and research needs. Berkeley will continue its collaboration with Stanford. The focus will be the papyrus collection at the Stanford University Library. In this period graduate students will catalogue the entire collection. Professors Manning and Hickey will select 75 pieces for conservation. Digitization and conservation will take place either at Berkeley or at Stanford. Chicago: continue entering metadata from the OI and the Regenstein collection, digitizing the corresponding objects, and re-housing the papyri at the Regenstein . Columbia: continuation of imaging (local funding); upgrading of catalog records; maintenance and development of the central interface. Duke: maintenance and upgrading of the DDBDP, particularly addition and proofreading of recently published volumes and adding the apparatus criticus; finalize the move of the database from the Perseus site to the Perkins Library; refreshing the records of the Duke Papyrus Archive; and updating the Checklist. Michigan: Conservation, cataloging and digital capture of approximately 1,000 unpublished papyri. Continue work on standardizing subject heading and geographic names; expand development of K-12 resources (internal funding). Pennsylvania: complete classification of texts in the Uninversity Museum according to language, and genre; focus on the unpublished papyri in Coptic which form the largest part of this collection. New York University: catalog the portion of the collection that consists of Coptic and Arabic texts; the latter, according to an expert, is one of the most important groups in American collections. Stanford: catalog the entire collection housed in the Stanford University Library with help from Berkeley staff; conserve 75 papyri; scan the entire collection (see above, under Berkeley's plan). Washington University: *****
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. The details of what will be done at each institutions are provided in their plans of work in Appendixes 9***.[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 1-4 can be set out here. Text: 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.
13. Availability of Preserved Materials 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. 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, have begun to follow in Phase 4 after completing the cataloging of 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),[11] 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 CD or even DVD, 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. The improvement in the last few years 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, began creating resources for undergraduate students at the end of APIS 2, and at present it is creating a variety of tools and resources for K-12 students in cooperation with selected schools in the Ann Arbor area. Such resources can, at some stage, be developed through the central APIS site.
14. Storage of Preserved Materials 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;[12] 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). The details are given in Appendix *.
15. Research 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 5. 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.
16. Project Management and Staffing 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. Bagnall served as Project Director for phases 1-2. Since 2000, Traianos Gagos, now senior papyrologist at the University of Michigan and President of the ASP, succeeded Bagnall as Project Director, a role in which he will continue in Phase 5.[13]
Phases 1-3 of APIS operated with a relatively informal governance structure, particularly since award budgets did not always allow sufficient funds for regular meetings. Columbia University and then the University of Michigan have served as managing partners for the consortium, with the funds for the other institutions provided through subcontracts. Direct central intervention in local operations is thus 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. As the intellectual assets, size, and complexity of APIS have grown, however, it has become clear that a more formal approach to governance and ownership of assets was required. The main elements of our consortial arrangements at present 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 it can be convened for a meeting if needed (as it has annually during Phases 3 and 4). The fall, 2003 meeting agreed that APIS should be managed by an Executive Committee of five elected by the full Steering Committee, and it entrusted a temporary Executive Committee with the task of drawing up by-laws for a governance structure. The budget for Phase 5 provides for the cost of meetings for the Executive Committee, but not for the full representative body; if a meeting of the latter is required, institutions will have to bear the cost of representation. Lists of the members of these bodies are given in Appendix **, along with a copy of the draft by-laws.
(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 (apisgeneral@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.
Details of staffing at the individual institutions are given in the work plans (Appendices (9-**).
[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] A cataloger at the University of Michigan has made substantial progress in standardizing subject headings and geographic names to conform to Libray of Congress Subject rules. This list will be shared with the other partner institutions. [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] CD #E was the last to be distributed in CD. From this point on the TLG will be distributed only on the www, since there is no plan for the production of a new, updated, CD. [12] 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. [13] For presentations of his contributions to the project, 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. |