Dyabola Tutorials

Dyabola is the name we in Classics usually use to refer to the Archäologische Bibliographie (also sometimes called the Realkatalog) of the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, an excellent resource for bibliography in the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean world.  The Archäologische Bibliographie is actually only one of a number of resources available through Projekt Dyabola (see also their blog) on the web, but it is the main one, and the only one to which UGA subscribes.

Dyabola includes citations for books, chapters, journal articles, festschriften and book reviews, but does not contain the full text of these reources. As of this writing it includes citations from 1956- May 2010, and has ca. 566,535 items by ca. ca. 96,813 authors.  There is a free version of the database called Zenon DAI, which has a rather different interface.

I used Dyabola as a graduate student in the late 1990s, and found that once you got used to its unusual interface, it was a powerful tool for discovering citations on a topic.  I’m re-immersing myself in it right now to start teaching it to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students.  My first step has been to gather existing online descriptions of and tutorials for Dyabola.  These include:

• Youtube videos created by Michael Hughes of NYU in late 2009.  This is where I recommend anyone new to Dyabola to start (at least until I can develop my own tutorial!).  There are two, beginning and advanced, and they are fairly short (less than 5 minutes) and clear.
• A static web page at UC Berkeley gives an overview of searching for those who hate to learn by video; a similar page is provided by the American Academy in Rome, and another at Bryn Mawr.
• Dyabola’s own directions are somewhat difficult to use, but for those wrestling with complex searches, or seeking to really understand the database’s power, they are useful.  They are available in English.
• in 1995, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review published John Tamm’s discussion of Dyabola (which was then available on CD-Rom), which remains useful for its description of the scope and structure of the database.  Reading this detailed review will make younger scholars realize (and older scholars remember) how very blessed we are by the advances in technology that have taken place over the intervening 15 years.

Know of a resource for getting to know Dyabola that I’ve missed?  Please met me know in comments!

Tutorial for New L’Annee Philologique Interface

Here’s a link to a first draft of a tutorial for the new interface to L’Annee.  I’ll be teaching the interface to a class (UGA’s Summer Classics Institute students) for the first time on June 14th, so it may see some revision after that. I teach the interface “live” in the classroom, and ask the students to follow along on the computers in the teaching lab, but I give them a powerpoint tutorial to come back and refer to if they get stuck when they are on their own.

L annee philologique_online_new

View more presentations from phoebeacheson.

If anyone would like to refer others to this tutorial, or embed it in your course pages (it does embed, but this blog style does not support embeds), feel free to do so, with proper attribution of course.

Tutorials for L’Annee Philologique

This is a write-up I did for a class in the fall of 2009, evaluating existing tutorials for a database and then creating one of my own.

L’Annee Philologique (http://www.annee-philologique.com/aph/, by subscription)

L’Annee (as it is commonly known) is a subject-specific database for Classical studies – languages, history, art, and archaeology.  It originated as a print index in the 1920s and has been published annually since then.  The index became available on CD-Rom in the 1990s, and a web version is now available.  Entries from the print indexes covering 1924-2007 are now searchable through the online L’Annee, and new volumes are added annually; 2008 is expected to be available online in September 2010.  The indexing work of L’Annee is supported by national research funds in France and the United States, as well as several academic institutions.  It has offices in France, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, generally attached to academic institutions.  Each office has a specific scope of materials to index, based on country of publication.  L’Annee’s goal is to provide a comprehensive index of the international research literature in Classical Studies, and to that end it indexes about 1500 journals as well as books, festschriften, dissertations, and book reviews.

L’Annee’s online user interface has long been a trial to researchers in Classics; the database is useful because of its content, and in spite of its interface (which is available in English).  One can search by Modern Author (there seems to be some authority control), Full Text (which is a keyword search of the citation; the database does not contain full text of articles), Ancient Author and Text (authority control is also in effect), Subjects and Disciplines (subject headings, which are nested although very broad – “archaeology” is one; also they were unfortunately changed with v. 67 (1997) so one can either search before-1997 headings or 1997-on headings, but not both), Date, and Other Criteria.  Generally, to conduct an effective search on a topic requires the building of a search: for example, if one were looking for articles about the treatment of guests in the works of Homer one could search for the ancient author Homer, search for “guest” in the Full Text (making sure to search for the word meaning “guest” in at least German and French in addition to English), and then combine the result sets using AND in the search builder.  L’Annee does allow citations to be emailed, downloaded, or exported to a bibliographic management software (directly to Refworks, through the use of a filter with EndNote.)

To develop my tutorial, I relied on my personal experiences searching L’Annee as a researcher, and on my experience demonstrating this database for graduate students and undergrads in library instruction sessions.  Even some faculty have remarked to me that they did not know about the possibility of combining searches using AND, OR, or NOT in L’Annee until I demonstrated this feature to a class.  I included some sections in the tutorial as a direct result of questions I have fielded from students about the use of L’Annee, especially the section on exporting citations to RefWorks.  While I was working on the tutorial I sent out a message on Facebook to my Classics contacts asking for specific tips or tricks about how to best use L’Annee.  I also emailed the list of first-year Classics graduate students at UGA asking for any suggestions they might have.  I was not entirely surprised to get no response from either; I suspect most researchers in Classics, even those who use L’Annee regularly, still feel uncomfortable using it and do not consider themselves experts.

I also looked for existing tutorials on library or Classics department web sites that provided instruction in using L’Annee.  An annotated list follows:

Davidson College Library (http://www.davidson.edu/administrative/library/refer/aph_guide.asp)
This web page with screen shots was developed by Susannah Boylston.  It provides a basic overview of searching in L’Annee, presented in short, topical chunks of information.

University of New Brunswick Libraries (http://www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/APhGuide.html )
This is a rather longer and more detailed web page with screen shots, created by Leanne Wells. It is simple but fairly comprehensive.

Temple University Library (http://www.screencast.com/users/frowland/folders/Jing/media/1a3a8a75-7ef9-4bd1-b599-63f2ce4a7d91 )
This is an animated web tutorial with audio of librarian Fred Rowland describing what is happening on the screen and giving additional information.  The tutorial begins somewhat abruptly, without an introduction.  The tutorial covers only “Full text” searching, and then finding the text of a desired article through the Temple Library web site; it is quite short.

University of Texas at El Paso Library (http://utminers.utep.edu/nhill/searchap.htm)
This animated web tutorial was developed by Nancy Hill.  There is no audio, except clicks and the noise of typing.  Text boxes in red that appear on the screen explain the steps the user should take.  The video is several minutes long, but the viewer can advance the images by hand if she feels it is progressing too slowly.

Universitat Wurtzberg Universitatsbibliothek (http://www.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/service0/training_courses/e-tutorials/aph/ )
This video tutorial, with audio commentary (in German) by Christiane Maibach, is available in 12 sections, divided by topic.  Subtitles are available in case the user is on a computer without available sound.  Each section of the tutorial is quite long and rather slow, but the division into sections allows the user to concentrate on the topic desired.  It is extremely comprehensive, if unfortunately not very useful for most American students, since it is in German.

My tutorial:

http://www.slideshare.net/phoebeacheson/l-annee-philologique-online