GC Awarded Grant for Classics Archive Project

The Graduate Center will collaborate with classical studies scholars at Georgetown, Harvard, and the University of Virginia on Project Vivarium--a project aimed at developing new electronic resources for use by classics researchers. The Mellon Foundation has awarded the collaborative effort a $260,000 planning grant to help determine ways to integrate existing classical studies print and electronic resources to better serve scholars and students. The Graduate Center's portion of the grant is $60,980. It becomes the fifth grant awarded in 2005 so far for the project, following funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities ($200,000, plus an additional $100,000 in matching funds), the Getty Foundation ($49,000), the Samuel H. Kress Foundation ($10,000), and a private donor ($4,000).

The Graduate Center's efforts are directed by Professor Dee Clayman, Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Classical Studies. Since the mid 1980s, Professor Clayman has headed the Database of Classical Bibliography (DCB), an ongoing effort to transfer the massive Annee Philologique (APh) first to CD-ROM and now to a digitized online version. The Annee Philologique is the international bibliography of record for the field of classical studies since 1927, and its computerization has revolutionized the process of researching worldwide writings about ancient texts. Since its launch in 1989, the DCB has digitized and edited forty-two volumes of the APh containing 574,491 bibliographical records.

Project Vivarium is named for a monastery in early medieval Italy where the collection and indexing of manuscript books represented the most advanced work of the time.

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