About the Papyrological Navigator
2008- With additional funding from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, support for Papyri.info was successfully transitioned to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. Additional information may be found on the Integrating Digital Papyrology wiki at: http://idp.atlantides.org/trac/idp/wiki
November 2008. With one-year funding from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, phase 2 of the Papyrological Navigator project was completed in November 2008, and the Navigator was brought into full production at Columbia University.
The Papyrological Navigator now provides integrated access to three major papyrological databases, the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP), the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS). Key features of the Navigator include:
• Integrated display of available cataloging, translations, images and Greek transcriptions for all published documentary papyri as well as unpublished and literary papyri from major U.S. and European collections
• Fully integrated searching of composite metadata from all three data sources;
• Complete full-text searching of Greek transcriptions from the Duke Databank, using either beta code or Unicode;
• Advanced text searching techniques including lemmatized searching, complex string, Boolean and and proximity searching and flexible wildcarding;
• An experimental, scriptable query API for DDBDP Greek text searching that can be used by other systems to query that textbase;
• A large and growing number of high-quality, multiresolution images of papryi and ostraca in the collections of APIS partners;
• A public "number server" lookup function that allows users knowing one standard identifer for a paypyus to look up all other relevant identifying numbers, e.g., from different publications or source systems;
• Special branding within the interface to clarify the sources of different information displayed.
August 2007. During
2006/2007 Columbia
University Libraries initiated
a research and development project
with the working title of "Papyrological
Navigator" (PN). This effort
has been funded in part by Mellon
funds allocated by Prof. Roger
Bagnall from his 2003 Distinguished
Achievement Award, in part by
the National Endowment for the
Humanities (APIS 5 grant), and
in part by Columbia University
Libraries. The goal of this effort
has been to demonstrate proof
of concept that a system can be
designed to provide an integrated
display of a variety of scholarly
data sources relevant to the study
of ancient texts.
The tools chosen for this prototype
will include portlet technology,
"web services"protocols and a newer,
highly functional image display
software platform. The Navigator
project builds on and moves
beyond the creation of centralized
"union databases,"such as APIS,
to leverage and integrate content
created and hosted elsewhere in
the scholarly world.
The Navigator prototype is being
designed with an eye toward scaling,
so that it will in principle be
able to incorporate and integrate
data sources far beyond the few
initial sources we have used in
this pilot. The choice of a portlet
platform will also enable personalization
and profiling so that scholars can
make the tool more efficient for
their particular type of research.
An early version of the prototype
has already successfully demonstrated
the integration of a broad range
of key papyrological sources including
APIS, DDbDP, and HGV.
Columbia will continue work on
the Navigator prototype through
June 2007, at which point it is
to be released in a beta version
for testing and experimentation
by the papyrological community.
Among the remaining tasks for this
phase of the Navigator are to improve
metadata search and retrieval, to
operationalize a web-services-based
"number server"so that the Navigator
can identify and access the same
object across dissimilar databases,
and to populate the prototype with
new image displays from the APIS
collection, regenerated and served
using the eRez / IView or FSI platform
recently purchased and installed
at Columbia.
Contacst:
Rodney Ast, APIS Project Coordinator,
Columbia University
Stephen
Davis, Director, Columbia Libraries
Digital Program
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