 |
 |
Advanced Papyrological Information System -- Phase 2
A Joint Project of
Columbia University
Duke University
Princeton University
The University of California, Berkeley
The University of Michigan
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Yale University
NARRATIVE
1. Introduction
This application requests support for the second phase 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 cataloguing and an innovative and experimental electronic system linking cataloguing with images, bibliography, text, and published literature. The Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) project, although leading to a permanent "product" and conceived of as a continuing cooperative venture among six major American universities with cooperation from European institutions, is presented here as a four-year project, for the second and concluding two years of which the present application seeks Endowment support.
Preservation activities generally stand today in the position of the Roman god Janus, looking both forward to the astonishing capabilities of new technology and back to traditional methods of recording and preserving the intellectual and physical heritage of earlier millennia. The APIS project shares this bidirectional character. The larger part of the activities for which support is requested in this grant period are established, well tested, and traditional: physical conservation of ancient artifacts with writing, cataloguing in standard library records (the US-MARC AMC format), and recording of the images of these unique objects to reduce the wear and tear of use of the originals and preserve their intellectual contents against the possibility of catastrophe. The value of these activities is well recognized, and the importance of the collections in question will be described in section 2. But this project is something more than an assemblage of separate proposals for preservation.
What is distinctive about this project is exactly the reason that it is not a batch of unrelated applications for these preservation purposes: the institutions involved have adopted collectively a set of standards for imaging, for the formats of the several types of electronic data generated, and for the linking of the various sets of electronic data. The entire project is thus being carried out with a view to the creation of an integrated information system, available over the Internet (and perhaps later in other forms, depending on the evolution of technology). The cooperative aspect of the proposal is thus central to its existence, for it will replace the prospect of a world of incompatible, separate systems, each with its own standards, with that of a single, seamless system that will be readily usable not only by papyrologists but by scholars and students in other fields. APIS has, by its timely start, already made it more likely than not that there will be standards, not only in North America but worldwide, and it has set an example to other disciplines of what is possible. Along the way, it has brought a renewal of interest in two of the collections participating.
APIS will in time not only entirely transform instruction and research in papyrology but also, for the first time, make papyrological materials readily accessible to nonspecialists. This will in fact be its most central outcome. The vast resources of the papyri have until now been relatively little used 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. APIS will make it possible to change that situation. These are large claims, but they are fully justified, we believe, in what follows. The prototype of APIS, available in early fall, 1997, will give a first glimpse of what it will make possible when fully in place, and even the forerunners and individual institutions have in the last two years attracted great interest from schools and the general public. A selection of the enormous amount of public interest that APIS has already--with hardly any effort--generated is given in Appendix 11.
Finally, APIS will serve as 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.
2. Significance of the Papyri
Papyrus was the most important writing material of the ancient world and perhaps ancient Egypt's most important legacy; alongside it were used other (often cheaper) materials, like wood and clay (broken pottery sherds 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. 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 lost works as the lyrics of Sappho and the Paeans of Pindar, the comedies of Menander, the Mimes of Herodas, the orations of Hypereides, the Constitution of the Athenians by Aristotle, 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, and farm and crop reports. As such, these documentary papyri differ little from modern archival material; except for their usually fragmentary nature and extreme antiquity, they reflect the quotidian affairs of government, commerce, and personal life in much the same way that modern records do.
From the documentary papyri were born the new 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.
Until now relatively little classical material available to a general audience has been available in electronic form, and that (mainly through the Perseus project) has primarily been concentrated on the archetypal canonical period, Periclean Athens.(1) APIS, designed to be usable by nonspecialists, can open up material outside the canon and allow the full diversity of a multilingual and multicultural ancient society to be visible both in text and in images to 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 self-evidently of central importance for classical history and literature, but it is also of immense importance for other areas. 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 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 the papyri for the history of philosophy. 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 American collections involved in the first phase of this project are the six most substantial in size and scholarly value of contents in the country. They also include 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 strengths which we set out briefly here; collectively they dominate American holdings in the 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) will join APIS with its own funding. We will be providing them and any other collections wishing to join, with detailed technical specifications to allow this to happen without extensive work on the part of the existing partners.
Berkeley's collection stems from a single excavation, that carried out by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt at Tebtunis (southern Fayum) in 1899/1900 with financing from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. The excavation yielded three large lots of material: (1) cartonnage from the mummification of crocodiles, mainly from the late second and early first centuries B.C.; (2) cartonnage from human mummies of the third and second centuries B.C.; and (3) papyri found in the ruins of the town, from the first three centuries of our era. Only a small part of this collection has ever been given careful study; the total number of fragments exceeds 21,000, although many of these are extremely small. The bulk of the collection is in Greek, but there is also a significant body of material in Demotic Egyptian.
Michigan's, the largest American collection if small fragments are discounted, was the earliest to begin large-scale collecting in 1920, with continuous subsequent purchases until 1943, and then again in the 1980s. In the early years, the papyri were acquired through a "cartel" that was comprised of the British Museum, several American universities (Columbia, Michigan, Yale, Princeton, etc.) and a number of European universities. Michigan's holdings grew further from an unprecedented excavation over 11 consecutive seasons (1924-1935) in the ancient Egyptian town of Karanis. Most of the papyri from this expedition were returned to the Egyptian government in 1954 as part of the original agreement, but approximately 1,000 individual papyrus fragments, along with negatives and Polaroid pictures of many of the returned papyri, remained at the University of Michigan. Today, the Michigan Papyrus Collection is among the largest worldwide. It contains over 7,000 inventory numbers and has more than 10,000 individual fragments (many of the inventory numbers include multiple fragments). The papyri in the Michigan collection cover almost two millennia of history, ranging from ca. 1000 BC to 1000 AD, with the majority from the third century BC to the seventh century AD. The majority of the papyri are in Greek, but there are large groups of papyri in all languages of the various ethnicities that once lived in Egypt, in particular Hieratic Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic, Arabic, Latin, and Aramaic. In addition to the papyri, the Michigan collection contains other writing surfaces that were in use in the ancient world, such as ostraca (pot shards), lead, wax and wooden tablets, parchment, and rarely, paper.
Columbia's papyrus collection began with distributions from the Egypt Exploration Fund in the early years of this century, but serious purchasing started in 1923. Most of the collection was acquired through the "cartel" mentioned earlier. It was supplemented with a sizable collection of ostraca purchased in 1964 and 1965 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It contains today about 800 papyrus inventory numbers (again, many of these covering multiple fragments) and about 3,600 ostraca. The papyri are mainly in Greek, but with a range similar to that of Michigan. The ostraca are mainly in Coptic but include some in Hieratic, Demotic, and Greek.
The Princeton papyrus collection also began with Egypt Exploration Society distributions, but most of its holdings were acquired through the same cartel or in separate but related purchases in the 1920s. Part of this lot was acquired by Robert Garrett for his own collection but deposited in the Princeton University Library; these papyri were donated to Princeton in 1942. In addition, some papyri have come into the collection through a variety of gifts and purchases since that time. It totals approximately 1,250 pieces. The two-thirds of the collection that has received publication or preliminary inventorying is mainly in Greek, but Latin, hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, Coptic, and Arabic are also represented.
Yale's papyrus collection began in 1889 with a gift of papyri from the excavations of W. M. Flinders Petrie at Hawara. Additions were made in the first decade of the 20th century through distributions of the Egypt Exploration Fund, in the 1920s through the cartel mentioned above, and, after 1925, from the purchases made in Europe and the Middle East by Michael Rostovtzeff and other members of the Yale faculty. The Yale excavations in the 1920s and 1930s at Dura-Europos yielded several hundred further items, including a large number of Latin texts. Large groups of material were acquired in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, including a sizable number of Arabic documents. Items have been added sporadically since the 1960s. The collection as of May, 1997, has over 5,000 inventoried items and many uninventoried. The inventoried level represents ca. 8,000 pieces (many small fragments are catalogued and mounted under a single number), of which ca. 7,500 are fully catalogued, conserved, and mounted in plexiglass, and ca. 500 are catalogued but not yet conserved (and require more than routine conservation). There are a small number of wooden and wax tablets, parchment, palm leaf, and paper items. The date of the material ranges from ca. 1700 B.C. to the 12th century of our era, with the majority of the items falling in the Roman and Byzantine periods. Although most items in the collection are Greek, the number of Latin and Arabic papyri is uncommonly high. The range of languages correponds to that in the Michigan collection but also includes Pahlavi, Syriac, and Hebrew.
Duke began to acquire papyri seriously only in 1969, but has emerged as a major collection in the quarter-century since that time, with total holdings of about 1200 pieces, mostly in Greek but some in Latin, Demotic, Coptic, and Arabic.
These collections are all of great international importance, and collectively they are the core of the American holdings of such documents, with approximately 45,000 items. Nearly forty volumes of texts from them have been published or are in press, and active work is in progress on all of the 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 guess the six institutions possess a tenth of the total.
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 in electronic form 100 percent of the published texts of Greek and Latin documentary papyri and ostraca (up to mid-1996) through the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), now available on the Web through Perseus as well as on CD-ROM; the bulk of recent bibliography through the files for 1960-1968 and 1976-1994 of the Bibliographie Papyrologique, with a 1960-1996 version expected in the next six months; a completed project in the area of cataloguing of collections, using a standard library catalogue record type, with extended subject access (at Duke); and work underway for APIS at all of the member institutions in image capture and cataloguing. These resources are described in more detail later in this application.
There are also other relevant undertakings. The Chicago Demotic Dictionary project has both text and imagery for cursive late Egyptian in Macintosh word processing format. Prosopographical projects are underway in Louvain (converting the Prosopographia Ptolemaica to electronic form) and London (creating a prosopography of Roman Egypt; it will coordinate technological standards with Louvain). In addition, a typological electronic catalogue is near completion in Heidelberg and should be available during the next twelve months.(2)
These developments, though relatively recent, have together already transformed scholarship in the field and continue to do so. They are far from realizing the full potential for changing scholarship and education in this discipline, however, and already it can be recognized that only the APIS-related projects have really cut loose from the technology of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the existing resources are available on the Internet, some on floppy disk, some on CD-ROM, and some not at all outside the place of creation. Like most projects of that era in the humanities, these are rapidly being left behind as user interface software moves forward at astonishing speed. Proposals that left most people gasping with disbelief in 1992(3) were becoming everyday phenomena in 1995 when we proposed the first phase of APIS and surprise no one today. Moreover, the existing array of unintegrated tools has done little to lower barriers to the study of papyri by nonspecialists, including students. This is why the consortium of six institutions(4) decided to build an Advanced Papyrological Information System 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.
There is another grave difficulty in the pre-APIS state of things. Everything said above about research tools concerns only the published papyri and ostraca, a sizable body of material (worldwide, about 50,000 documentary texts, to which must be added perhaps 5,000 literary texts) but only a fraction of what has survived. Although many surviving papyri are fragmentary, these modern research tools provide scholars with the capability of extracting information from them to a degree hardly possible before, and even of combining fragments scattered in different collections with an ease never before known. No one knows how many unpublished pieces lie in the world's collections, but it is unlikely to be less than five times the number of published texts. Some of these enjoy excellent conditions of conservation and storage, but others have scarcely been touched in three-quarters of a century or more since their acquisition; this is true even of major collections with resident papyrological experts, and far more true of small, isolated collections.
Much work has already been carried out by the partner institutions in laying the foundations for APIS and in the work completed during the first year of phase 1 of APIS. This work, and that to be completed during the coming twelve months, is described succinctly in the following paragraphs; the state of things expected at the end of phase 1 (--APIS-1--) is treated in more detail in the individual institutional work plans included in the appendixes to this application. In all cases the work completed will match or exceed the targets set in the revised workplan for APIS-1 (submitted in spring, 1996).
That workplan set two primary goals. The first was to develop a prototype APIS, which would demonstrate that what we envisaged was technically feasible; through it the incorporation of material at multiple institutions into a single digital library would be achieved, and the barriers to the display and searching of Greek (and other non-roman scripts) over the Internet would be overcome. The second was to accomplish enough on the substantive work of conservation, cataloguing, and imaging to provide sufficient material for this prototype system. A paper application is not the route to showing the success of the first element, but as we note the technical basis for this prototype now exists, in part through the work of the NDLF, in part through APIS's cooperation with Perseus. The prototype will be in operation during fall, 1997, and enhanced continuously thereafter. The address will be provided to the Endowment for reviewers' use. What follows gives some details of this, but concentrates otherwise on the work at individual institutions in creating the materials to make this prototype something more than a toy with a handful of records.
(1) Duke. The Endowment supported a pre-APIS project at Duke University for conservation, cataloguing (to US-MARC AMC standards), and imaging (by color scanning) of the entire collection, work carried out by Peter van Minnen and other libray staff. Duke is now one of the few collections in the world to be in such good order. The enormous traffic on Duke's Papyrus Archive Web site has shown the potential demand for public access to this information (sample correspondence in Appendix 10). Duke also was the first institution to put images of all of its papyri on the Internet in combination with catalogue records, linking them with hypertext markers. These too have had heavy use. During APIS-1, Duke has to date concentrated on collaborative work with Perseus aimed first at bringing the Duke Data Bank online (already accomplished) and second at transforming the DDBDP into a fully SGML-tagged file with improved access capabilities.
(2) Michigan. The start of APIS-1 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 starting in 1991, and a local electronic catalogue (especially of the published and assigned holdings) dating from the same era. All the testing was doone through the Papyrology Collection web site from 1993 onward with interactive electronic questionnaires. In February, 1997, the local eectronoic catalogue was also made available on the Web. During APIS-1, Michigan has so far created about 600 complete catalogue records ready to be transferred to US-MARC and has begun imaging (with a Kontron camera), starting with papyri published in the third volume of Michigan Papyri. This volume has itself been scanned and converted into an SGML document as an experiment. By the end of APIS-1, Michigan will have completed 1,400 catalogue records and images for all of these items (some from originals, others from photographs of excavation material returned to Cairo).
(3) Columbia. Preliminary work for APIS at Columbia included the bulk of the conversion of the retrospective Bibliographie Papyrologique and the start of an electronic catalogue of the Coptic ostraca, which were the least studied part of the collection. During APIS-1, Columbia has so far completed catalogue records for 1000 ostraca and over 500 papyri, including all of the published ones and all of the Arabic texts, all unpublished. By the end of APIS-1, all of these will have been imaged, and an additional 500 ostraca and 100 unpublished papyri will have been catalogued and imaged. All papyri catalogued will also have been reglassed.
(4) Yale. Beginning in 1983, Yale undertook at its own expense a conservation program for the papyrus collection. All items were by the start of APIS-1 individually sorted and housed in acid-free paper; during APIS-1, on its own funds, Yale will have completed the process of conserving, cataloguing, and mounting the items in plexiglass, starting with the older acquisitions and continuing through the most recent. Yale also created an electronic catalogue in an inhouse database; these will by the end of APIS-1 have been transformed at Columbia into US-MARC records like those created at Columbia for its own collection. Yale has also scanned the items from the first volume of Yale papyri using an in-house IBM digital camera.
(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. Before APIS-1, a Dutch papyrologist, Arthur Verhoogt, visited Berkeley and drew up a comprehensive condition report on the collection. This report served as the basis for the work of APIS-1, in which Berkeley will have conserved, catalogued, and imaged more than 400 of the papyri previously housed in decaying Vinylite mounts. A notable feature of APIS-1 was the discovery of a solution (using a deionizing fan) to the cling problems the old mounts caused and which had been expected to create major conservation problems.
(6) Princeton. Princeton created before the start of APIS-1 a basic finding aid for the papyrus collection, in the form of a Preliminary Checklist of the Princeton University Collections of Papyri (1995). During APIS-1, Princeton expects to complete this finding aid and convert it into an SGML-encoded (EAD DTD) form, covering essentially the whole of the collection, which has been surveyed in its entirety and the previously undescribed pieces added. Consultants will have identified the Arabic, Coptic, and Demotic material.
4. Condition of the Materials
Papyrus is a remarkably durable material, far more permanent than the 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 most 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 library, which has often meant never.
In most papyrus collections conservation work is carried out by papyrologists, that is, by scholars, rather than by professional conservators. Reasons for this state of affairs include the relatively simple character of much of the work to be done and 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, 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 Fackelmann, former conservator in Vienna.(5) 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.(6)
The University of Michigan has created a brief guide to current best practice in papyrus conservation, which has been developed to its present form in collaboration with conservator staff at the other APIS partner institutions. This was included as Appendix 7 to the application for APIS-1 and is available on request. The funding level of APIS-1 did not permit us to hold the intended one-week conservation training seminar at the beginning of the grant period. Most of the institutions have had library conservators rather than papyrologists do the conservation work in APIS-1, in part as a result of the lack of opportunity to train the papyrological staff.
As already indicated, the Duke collection is now, thanks to Endowment support, thoroughly cleaned, straightened, and mounted in suitable glass. They are stored in acid-free boxes in the vaults of the Special Collections Library.
Conditions at Columbia and Michigan are variable. During APIS-1, all published Columbia papyri and all unpublished ones catalogued for APIS will have been reglassed in suitable glass. The remainder are still either in paper folder or in the heavy glass with oozing tape resulting from treatment in the 1960s; this glass will have been replaced in its entirety by the end of APIS-2. Its 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, will be more than half relocated to an acid-free storage cabinet environment by the end of APIS-1.
A condition survey of published documents on papyrus and other substrates in the Michigan Papyrology Collection was conducted in June-July, 1994. The survey report was included in the APIS-1 application (Appendix 11). Over the five years before the start of APIS Michigan refoldered the bulk of the collection and systematically checked the pieces framed in glass; a total of some 6,000 papyri were thus given preservation attention. All papyri included in APIS-1 will have been given preservation attention if they did not already receive it.
As described above, the bulk of Berkeley's collection was put in acid-free folders by the International Photographic Archive of Papyri staff in 1979. Much of the rest, however, was either in Vinylite mounts of the 1930s, which needed replacement, or still in need of initial conservation treatment and kept in tin boxes from the time of the excavation (details were given in Appendix 10 of the Phase 1 application). As indicated above, APIS-1 has seen the successful removal of more than 400 pieces from these decaying mounts and their placement in standard glass. APIS-2 provides for the continuation of this conservation work.
Recent work on the Yale collection is described above in section 3. The entire collection has now been given conservation treatment and rehoused. It is kept in the controlled environment of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Princeton's collection had little conservation attention for some years, and conservation is a large part of its activities in APIS-1. On completion of this phase, the papyri will be relocated to the climate-controlled chamber described in the APIS-1 application (Appendix 12).
5. Access to the Collections and Bibliographic Control
Once again, there are large historic differences among the partners in this project, but these are being diminished by the work of APIS-1. All of the Duke papyri have been catalogued in US-MARC AMC records that are part of the Duke Library catalogue and also added to RLIN and OCLC. It has, thus, a mode of access that for the combination of accessibility and quality is unparalleled in the world.
Beginning in 1991, Michigan began to develop a detailed electronic catalogue for the published and unpublished papyri, ostraca and other writing surfaces, including also papyri that once belonged to other collections (e.g., the Cornell collection, part of the Michigan collections since the 1970s). This database, which was originally created with a program called 4th Dimension and was migated in summer 1996 to FileMaker Pro, is now available in SGML encoded form (EAD-DTD) on the Web; it gives detailed information on the first and later editions, journals or series in which the papyri and ostraca appeared, plates in the edition, and subsequent corrections cited in the Berichtigungsliste. Because of the magnitude of the collection and the variety of ways in which papyri are being stored (in regular boxes; in oversize boxes; sandwiched between glass; in lockers provided for the use of scholars; in lockers for "problematic" pieces), the database that was created at the time included a special field that marked the exact location of each published papyrus. Thus, the database secured also physical control over the collection. This database will be gradually converted into US-MARC records for APIS as it is enriched by more detailed cataloguing work.
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, and kept in the curator's office. Work in the year before the beginning of APIS-1, and more intensively since the start of the project, has led to the creation of electronic records for all published papyri, some 150 unpublished Arabic papyri, and over 1000 ostraca. These records will be uploaded into US-MARC AMC-compatible records.
Yale has, as indicated above in section 3, created its own electronic database of the papyri in its collection, using the program Inmagic. This catalogue was completed in early 1997. Its fields will be mapped to US-MARC fields by academic information staff at Columbia and the database converted; it is expected that only modest manual work will be necessary to complete the conversion, which will take place during APIS-1, although further enhancement may take place later.
Princeton's Preliminary Checklist has been mentioned above; this is the principal current means of access to the collection. It will by the end of APIS-1 be an SGML-coded document.
As we have indicated above, so far electronic technology has made some headway in making papyrological material available to scholars in other areas of the study of antiquity, but hardly beyond that domain and certainly not to a broader educated public. We believe that it is possible to cross that boundary and devise a system in which the high technical threshold of serious research is no longer a barrier to wider educational use of the material. The core of this breakthrough is the combination of the subject cataloguing and descriptive text in the cataloguing records (as developed in the Duke catalogue project) with translations of the published papyri and contemporary knowledge-base navigation tools and images deliverable over the Internet. 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 the APIS is the unification of all of the existing catalogues by converting them for public consultation into a single format (US-MARC AMC). This process will be well underway at all institutions except Princeton by the end of APIS-1, and it is expected to be completed in APIS-2 at all of the institutions.
APIS will thus be part of the growing riches available over the information superhighway to all those connected to it. Because it will draw on existing standards rather than creating idiosyncratic data structures or access methods, it will have maximum transparency for the user. Its methodology is described further below.
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. This project envisages ultimately preserving, recording, and cataloguing all of the pertinent materials in these collections. In the case of Duke, this preservation work has already been carried out with NEH support. Yale completed conservation work during APIS-1. At Columbia, the entirety of the collection is targeted for work during the two phases of APIS, as described above. Princeton will have completed most basic work by the end of APIS-1 and will deal with remaining cases (including two Egyptian rolls not yet relaxed) in APIS-2.
Michigan's collection is much larger, but as indicated above, had already benefited from considerable pre-APIS attention. During APIS-1, conservation has proceeded in tandem with cataloguing and before imaging; the same procedure will be followed in APIS-2. By the end of APIS-2, all published texts and those assigned for publication will have been covered. Evidently a significant amount of work will remain to be completed after APIS-2.
At Berkeley, similarly, the size of the collection precludes completion of preservation work in APIS-2. Attention will be focused on the papyri mounted at present in Vinylite, which are the most at risk of the entire collection, as well as being the most heavily used (because many of them are published). A detailed examination of the material in tin boxes will be carried out as part of a general survey of the collection in APIS-2, giving for the first time an accurate estimate of the amount of material there and the work required to put it into satisfactory condition.
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 that they are part of. A key characteristic of APIS is its modular, scalable character. It will be designed so that both new types of information and greater quantities of the existing types can be added. Beginning with the existing data resources for three collections as of mid-1997, it will in summer and early fall, 1997, produce a pilot system, which will be a fully operative system containing the main features of the ultimate APIS. These six institutions have altogether about 45,000 items (including papyri, ostraca, and other ancient items with writing in ink), of which about one-eighth have been published to date. The first phase will have put catalogue records for about 8,000 items, plus text, translation, and images for varying smaller numbers of items, into an integrated system available over the Internet to begin to get user response.
The second phase of two years (1998-2000), for which the present application is made, will aim to complete these tasks, to make the pilot system with an enlarged amount of data and enhanced interface available for user testing locally and over the Internet, and to bring additional institutions into APIS. It will then, after the four year project period, be ready to expand to embrace the entire field, by adding collections one at a time or types of material in bulk. It aims to set a standard for worldwide cooperation. It is planned that work after APIS-2 will be carried out and funded separately rather than consortially, because once the standards are fully in place we believe that consortial management will add overhead rather than enhance the system. A governance structure will, however, remain in place to coordinate further work and the addition of new partners.
The initial model of APIS includes the following elements:
(a) Catalogue of papyri and ostraca, in a format acceptable nationally and internationally to bibliographic utilities. (These records will be accessible through those utilities as well as through APIS.) This is the heart of the system. The base format will be the US-MARC record type in its specific version for manuscript collections (AMC), and it will use standard Library of Congress Subject Headings and Art and Architecture Thesaurus index terms. (This is no small task, for these headings do not correspond to traditional papyrological classifications, but it is critical to the openness of the system to wide use. See Peter van Minnen's article in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 31 [1994] 159-170 for a full description.) The project will result in substantial additions to these standard repertories of headings. The experience gained by Duke will allow the other 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 has been successfully adapted at Duke for individual papyri with significant content. For very small fragments which preserve little information, the time and cost involved in creating individual MARC records is not appropriate, and such records would amount to little more than debris in the databases. The institutions will for these instead create standard MARC group records, which will then be linked to item-level SGML-coded text documents to function as finding aids, drawing on the experience of Berkeley in its Title II-C Finding Aids project on the creation of such aids and using the standards emerging from that project. We believe that this combination of cataloguing forms will apply the most appropriate form of access to different categories of material.
-- Duke's catalogue was completed before the project start date. All of these records are in standard US-MARC format. Duke has provided lists of the subject headings it has used to the other APIS partners.
-- Michigan's bibliographic records in a relational database (described above) uses fields closely mapped to US-MARC fields and can be converted automatically. The records are being enhanced as the papyri are brought into APIS.
-- The catalogue of papyri is being created from the publications and out of existing manual records at Columbia; considerable intellectual effort will be required to enhance these records. Work on cataloguing the Columbia ostraca into an electronic database began in 1995. These records will be mapped into standard US-MARC AMC records; these will then need to be enhanced with subject headings but will not have to be created afresh.
-- Yale's in-house electronic catalogue contains about 5000 records. It will also be converted by Academic Information Systems staff at Columbia into US-MARC format.
-- At Princeton and Berkeley, as at Columbia, work began from existing manual catalogues and lists, which contained only minimal information. As indicated, Princeton has begun with an SGML-coded finding aid, conversion of which into US-MARC records will be part of APIS-2; Berkeley has begun creating US-MARC records directly in APIS-1.
Both published and unpublished objects will be included in all of the completed catalogues, as already with the Duke collection, a major breakthrough in access for a field in which unpublished objects have generally been wholly unknown outside the home institution. This process will, naturally, take considerable time, especially in the case of the unpublished material.
The Catalogue will, by virtue of its combination of library standard subject headings with normal papyrological information, be the prime access point to the collections for a wide range of users. Full-text searching will be 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 will be able to go straight to them. Most of the activity of Phase 1 has been connected with the Catalogue and the underlying conservation work. More extensive detail about the individual institutional plans is given in the appendixes.
(b) Texts of the documents, drawn from the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. All published documentary texts from these collections, except for a few in recent journal articles, are now included in the DDBDP and can readily be linked to the catalogue records and other elements of APIS. The texts will be marked up during the remainder of APIS-1 using SGML in accordance with the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative. The Greek is represented in a standard character coding format referred to as Beta Code, which was developed originally in connection with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. During 1996-97, the Perseus project undertook the first stage of the conversion; the coming year will see the virtual completion of SGML tagging at a more detailed level.
It is our present intention eventually to transfer all of these texts from Beta code into Unicode (or its 32-bit counterpart ISO 10646, depending on the 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 for Preservation and Access, concluded that Unicode was rapidly approaching feasibility except in the Macintosh environment. Some APIS institutions may adopt Unicode well before the end of APIS-2, with the provision for reconversion into Beta code for users who need to download texts for use in environments where Unicode is not usable.
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 Phase 1 for cataloguing of such material has also contributed to making this a less pressing issue than it had originally been expected to be.
(c) Images of the documents. The APIS partners, as part of their preparations for this application, 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 are that true 600 dpi imaging through digital cameras (not flatbed scanners) is an appropriate minimum standard for images. For views of the entirety of large documents, 300 dpi images will be included, but 600 dpi or higher images of portions of the original. Papyrologists using these images, with the advantage of modern computer tools for text reconstruction, have consistently found them much more valuable than traditional photographs, either in black and white or in color, and 600 dpi provides sufficient resolution and color accuracy for almost all purposes. Some papyri or parts of papyri with exceptionally dense information will be captured at higher resolution. These standards, which are in line with industry standards and projects like the Vatican Library Project, will make images fully interchangeable among the institutions involved and allow ready consultation over the Internet.
In the case of relatively small papyri, our study concluded that 600 dpi imaging was feasible with existing digital cameras, and that such cameras would produce imagery that would never need replacing. For larger papyri, however, it was not clear that future advances in imaging technology will not bring considerable advantages. Newer models of digital cameras, such as the Phase One camera acquired by Columbia, allows direct imaging of up to 7,000 by 7,000 pixels, or eight times the area of the Kontron camera acquired by Michigan before the start of APIS-1. For larger papyri there are still some advantages to use of photographic intermediates, and Michigan plans to use 4x5 color photographic transparencies where appropriate. Princeton, which does not at present have a digital camera, will work entirely through 35 mm and 4x5 color transparencies, which will be digitized by Luna Imaging. Experience in reproducing paintings and other fine arts has shown that 4x5 transparencies are sufficient to allow retaking of digital imagery as the capabilities of the latter improve.
APIS will also eventually make use of multi-spectral imaging (MSI), a technology developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena) and applied to some Dead Sea Scrolls fragments with considerable success. MSI uses bandwidths in the extreme infrared to bring out writing by identifying what part of its spectral signature is unique to it and extracting that bandwidth. This technology also uses a digital camera, but with a special lens designed for sampling the spectrum at specified intervals of bandwidth. At present, MSI is still a rapidly developing technology, and the cameras that use it are not interchangeable with those supporting the standard color imaging already described. It is also useful only for that minority of papyri (and, importantly, ostraca, where contrast is often poor) where there are significant difficulties in bringing the writing out from the background. APIS plans to bring MSI into use in or after Phase 2, after the materials on which it will be used have been identified; at present it is impossible to estimate on what part of the collections it would be applicable.
All of the collections have existing bodies of photographic negatives made for various purposes in the past, and these will be scanned at an early stage. Michigan in particular has many photographs of texts once there but now returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and these photographs can also be digitized and included. Ultimately the vast resources of the International Photographic Archive of Papyri (centers in Brussels, Cologne, Oxford, and Urbana) can be drawn on as APIS grows beyond the original six collections. 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.
(d) Bibliography, from the Bibliographie Papyrologique project. The retrospective conversion of this index-card bibliography published in Brussels since 1932 began at Columbia and is being completed at Brussels for the period after 1960. This database is maintained in Filemaker Pro. The Centre de Papyrologie et d'Épigraphie Grecque of the Université Libre de Bruxelles anticipates completing the conversion before the end of APIS-1. It would ultimately be desirable for the cards for the period 1932-1959, at least for 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 much more difficult. We may look for other ways of covering the pre-1960 bibliography.
(e) Corrections and republications of texts (including redatings), as noted in the Berichtigungsliste griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Ägypten (1913- ) and elsewhere. This nine-volume set (with one index volume) lists the textual history of papyri and ostraca after their publication.(7) 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, (d) above. A significant part of this work was done at Duke in 1995-96, and completion is planned for APIS-2.
(f) Printed editions of the texts, including usually introduction, text, commentary, and translation. Most of these are in printed volumes, but some are in journal articles. These will be scanned using the techniques developed for digital library projects (see below) and included. In this way the actual image of the publication can be called up, while the ASCII text of the edition will be searchable. Where translations were not included in these editions (a tiny fraction of the cases), they will be created by the papyrologists on the staff and added as ASCII files in order to enhance access for students and scholars who do not know the original languages. (The intellectual rights to the existing volumes of papyri are held by the institutions holding the papyri; volumes are copyrighted, if at all, either by the universities or by their publishing agents. The texts themselves are viewed in papyrology as being in the public domain once they are first published, and no collection in the world requires scholars to get permission for reprinting a text.)
(g) 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, 4th ed. (1992), created by two of the developers of APIS (Bagnall and Oates) with other collaborators. This tool is available on disk and will be included in APIS as a pull-down tool to help users identify abbreviations in the scholarly literature.
8. APIS and digital libraries
APIS obviously does not exist in isolation. The side of APIS aimed at integrated electronic access, which is a pilot project at this point and will come to full fruition only in Phase 2 and beyond, has a context. There are many initiatives underway to digitize information and provide sophisticated access to it, and the scene changes rapidly. Because key technical personnel for Columbia and Michigan are deeply involved in the National Digital Library Federation's work, APIS is able to benefit immediately from the NDLF's development of standards, most importantly for the Making of America II project. These standards are aimed at allowing a collection of digital material dispersed across a large number of institutional servers function as a unity through a central metadata file which allows searching of the entirety of the viritual library thus created. A detailed discussion at a meeting in March, 1997, funded under contract from the Commission on Preservation and Access, concluded that APIS would be able to use these standards for most purposes, including the simultaneous use of material from multiple sites, but that a few specific elements like the central provision of a large textual database (the DDBDP and eventually a comparable translation repository) would require modifications.
9. Data structure and the user interface
APIS will be built essentially as a hypertext system, with built-in dynamic links among the various components. In this way users will be able to move easily from a text to the image of the original, to the first publication, to bibliography about it, or to its formal catalogue description. A substantial part of the work involved in creation of the system is the development of these hypertext links. Catalogue records will use the Z39.50 protocol.
To provide hypertext links, APIS will adopt the HTML (hypertext markup language) standard, which is developed from the industry standard SGML with the addition of a facility for indicating hypertext links. In this way, the data files will be readily adaptable to new and more flexible interfaces as they are created. The rapid development of WWW access tools like Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft Explorer has made ready access to such hypertext-linked data much easier, and we expect that there will be many new developments in such access tools in coming years. APIS will certainly be accessible through more than one software package. The distinction between the data structures and the access software is critical here. The data files will continue to be usable by many different means; for example, separate distribution of the DDBDP will continue for those who find this more convenient, catalogue records will exist in other databases, and so forth.
A major question yet to be resolved is the level of detail to be tagged. It is a relatively simple matter to tag at the document level, so that clicking on a papyrus brings up its image or text. But optimal convenience for scholarly use would provide line, word, or even character-level linking, so that (for example) a scholar wishing to check the reading of a particular word could zoom straight from that word in the text to that word in the image. It is evident that such tagging done manually would be prohibitively expensive (there are millions of words involved), but development work is underway in various places to automate such middle- and lower-level tagging. We expect to benefit from the expertise of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Rutgers/Princeton) and from the experience of the Vatican Library Project in this area.(8)
One major achievement of APIS-1, thanks to collaboration with Perseus, has been the cracking of the problem of the availability of non-roman character sets over the Internet. With the aid of freeware Greek fonts, the DDBDP can be used at the Perseus site in Greek characters on both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and an X-Windows version will be available shortly.
APIS will also enrich its basic software with additional tools as they become available. For example, a program for converting dates in the papyri into julian dates has been created for the Macintosh by Willy Clarysse (Leuven); this could be a tool button in APIS, allowing the user to call it up whenever a date appears and an equivalent is needed. Professor Clarysse has given permission for this use of his work.
10. Stages of Making APIS available
During the first year of APIS-1, individual institutional Web sites have made samples of the ultimate material available. The largest such site has been the Duke Papyrus Archive, with full catalogue records and images. A more limited site at Michigan is also now available. A foretaste of the kind of work that APIS will make possible can be seen from some of what has happened already with these individual sites; correspondence and descriptions about some examples are given in Appendix 10. They include both the scholarly and the public dimensions. A young researcher at Oxford discovered papyri at Duke relevant to a project he was working on, something that would never have happened without the electronic catalogue and its linked images. And a schoolteacher in North Carolina was able to bring images of ancient copies of the Odyssey into his classroom, thus helping give the ancient world much greater immediacy.
We anticipate that the first experimental APIS interface will be brought up in early fall, 1997, in order to allow participants in the project and other users to comment on its design as this evolves. Reviewers of the current application will be able to consult this site.
By the end of Phase 2, the full system will be operational, with data being constantly added as they pass through quality control checks and are ready for public release.
11. Plan of Work in Phase 2
The project is conceived as a four-year effort, with an initial application to cover the first two years. Detailed statements about work completed so far, to be completed during the second year of APIS-1, and planned for APIS-2, are given in Appendixes 1-6, the individual institution work plans. In the second two-year period, in summary, the project will focus on the following:
Berkeley: Cataloguing, conservation, and imaging of about 1000 frames of papyrus, completing the task of rescuing the papyri from the Vinylite mounts.
Columbia: Cataloguing, conservation, and imaging of about 400 papyri and 2000 ostraca, completing these tasks for the entire collection.
Duke: Maintenance and upgrading of the DDBDP, particularly addition of more critical work; developing a broader documentary reference system; adding texts and transcriptions of about 200 papyri in the course of publication.
Michigan: Cataloguing about 1800 items, completing the published papyri and ostraca; imaging of all of these (about 7,000 images, because some of the papyri are extremely long); consultant work to catalogue the unpublished Coptic and Arabic papyri.
Princeton: Turning the SGML finding aid into US-MARC records; adding the Egyptian-language (hieroglyphic or hieratic) papyri; imaging (via photography) of the entire collection; scanning the published volumes; completing conservation work.
Yale: Digital photography of 7,500 items from the collection.
The project will be operated under a grant to Columbia University, which will, apart from the work on its own papyrus collection, provide programming and management services for the electronic systems aspects of the project. The work at Duke, Michigan, Berkeley, Princeton, and Yale will be carried out by subcontracts to those institutions from Columbia. The work necessary at Brussels, the seventh sponsoring institution, will be funded locally. The details of what will be done at each U.S. institution are described in the plans of work in Appendixes 1-6.(9)
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 can be set out here.
Text: The DDBDP has been proofread by papyrologists at Michigan, volume by volume, separately from the data entry 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 it at Brussels, 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 on 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, and fidelity to the original shortly after their creation. As imaging has actually gotten underway at Berkeley, Columbia, and Michigan, the procedures developed for the joint Berkeley-Columbia Digital Scriptorium have been useful.
Catalogue 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 cataloguing rules by the library cataloguer responsible for adding subject headings and completing the US-MARC record.
12. Availability of Preserved Materials
Two quite separate, though related, questions must be addressed here. The first is the availability of the original papyri etc. 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 unglassed 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 will 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 is no part of our intention to impose one particular policy on the entire world of papyrus collections. The system will therefore build in the capability of providing different levels of access on a document-by-document basis.
Access to the 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 will dramatically change the situation for both published and unpublished texts. Published texts will now be freely accessible via image, 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, will now be readily available as well. 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. In this way, APIS will bring about a dramatic transformation of the accessibilty of these manuscripts.
Most existing electronic tools in classical studies are distributed on CD-ROMs or floppy disks and used on local microcomputers. The scale of APIS is unlikely to permit this mode of access in the near term for the entire system, particularly given the volume of stored images and the patchwork of access regulations governing them. The primary method of access will therefore be over the Internet. As with various recently-developed WWW tools, usage will require client software on the user's workstation for some operations, particularly in manipulating images. Users will need workstations of significant power, but the requisite level of computing power has continued to decline in cost in the two years since the application for APIS-1 was submitted, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. As with other tools, versions of the software will be made available for the Macintosh (in its PowerMac version), X-Windows workstations, and high-end Windows systems. Optimum use of APIS is likely in the near term to require 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. Just during the development of this proposal the range of tools available has changed dramatically. The improvement in the last two years of tools for telephone connection to the Internet means that full, even if not speedy, access to APIS will 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 useful for palaeographical analysis, thus creating a personalized database suited to the most immediate needs while away from network access.
Broadening public and educational access to the papyri will require some specific steps beyond those that will provide availability to scholars. We will create a home page designed for general users, to provide a less technical route into the resources of APIS. In its first stages such a home page will of necessity be experimental, for none of us has much experience with what is required and what is possible in this domain. All usage on this home page will be logged and studied (cf. below, section 14) to help guide planning for beyond Phase 2.
13. Storage of Preserved Materials
Here again there is a dual question: the artifacts and their intellectual contents. Where photographic negatives are created (of larger pieces), these will be placed in the National Underground Storage facility;(10) copy negatives will be maintained in the institutions. For the rest, the contents will be electronic files of considerable bulk. These 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 catalogue. Further protection will be provided by distribution of copies of the data to each partner institution (initially on tape, but a new medium may be adopted by unanimous agreement as technology develops).
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, the six 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 six university libraries.
(a) Michigan built (before APIS) a highly sophisticated separate storage chamber for the papyrus collection.
(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 ostraca are kept in drawers of metal cabinets on acid-free linings and in boxes; by the end of APIS-2 all should be in drawers. The areas in question will be air-conditioned as part of the planned renovation of Butler Library, the first phases of which began in summer, 1995.
(d) Yale's papyrus collection is housed in a climate-controlled vault in the Beinecke Library with humidity at 50 percent and temperature at 20 degrees C (both considered the ideal levels for papyrus) 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 Bancroft Library is in the process of creating new vault space within its present building. Accommodation will be made in the most secure area of the vault for housing the papyri.
(f) Princeton has a climate-controlled storage chamber in Firestone Library, in which the papyri will be stored after conservation work is completed.
14. 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 2. There is, after all, much we do not know as we embark on APIS. We have no idea, for example, 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. 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 home page briefly described in section 12 above. We hope from this 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.
15. Project Management and Staffing
The project was initially developed by a group of scholars convened by the Project Director in his role as President of the American Society of Papyrologists and received early encouragement from NEH staff involved with the earlier Duke project. Ludwig Koenen, the Herbert C. Youtie Professor of Papyrology and University Professor at Michigan, and John F. Oates, Professor of Classical Studies at Duke, are the other two senior members of the team. In addition the ASP group included Peter van Minnen (Duke) and Traianos Gagos (Michigan), expert and widely-published papyrologists serving in staff positions with the papyrus collections at their institutions. 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. The present application reflects this broad involvement of the various parties involved; the work plans in particular list these personnel and describe their duties.
We are under no illusion that managing a six-institution project is simple, particularly without a high-overhead central institutional management. The procedures in place in Phase 1 have worked fairly well, although the award budget did not allow sufficient funds to allow regular meetings. Columbia University will continue 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 communicate in the main by electronic means, but the budget provides for a meeting twice each year. 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 9.
(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 is already in existence (l-apis@umich.edu) and facilitated the study on imaging and the preparation of this proposal and its predecessor greatly. It is our main means of internal communication on matters of general interest. Sublists for the academic and technical staff are also used for more communications of more restricted interest.
(3) A Steering Committee in each institution, responsible for coordinating work locally. These will be 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 9.
Details of staffing at the individual institutions are given in the work plans (Appendixes 1-6).
Columbia
Libraries  Digital
Program |
|
Last revision:
10/20/05
© Columbia University |