So, farewell, O dead tree Encyclopedia Britannica

News today that Encyclopedia Britannica has decided not to print any more editions of its encyclopedia.  Sales of the paper version have been “negligible” for years, and 85% of the income comes from the online version.  I would imagine these sales are licenses to libraries and the like.  There is, apparently, some gloating from some anonymous erk in Wikipedia — the ‘encyclopedia’ that any teenager can edit (and especially Randy in Boise).

It’s a key moment, isn’t it?  The paper encyclopedia is now definitely dead.  That is, the major reference source until 1995 is now history. 

Any reference source in paper form is now obsolete.  Any source that is not read from end to end, but instead is accessed in bits and pieces, is now on borrowed time.  There are any number of such handbooks — we might think of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum.  They’re all dead meat, and just waiting to be collected.  They cannot, commercially, exist on paper any more.

It’s a brave new world.

Mind you, I do wish someone would sue the hell out of Wikipedia and force it to institute some proper controls and regulation of trolls.  It can’t grow much beyond its current status as “collection of hearsay”, until this is addressed.

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Partial translation of Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans online

A correspondent writes:

I have been enjoying Robert C. Hill’s two-volume translation of Theodoret’s commentary on Paul’s epistles.  For comparison of Romans, I found an older translation on Google books in The Christian Remembrancer, Vol XXI, 1839 (sadly, it only covers chapters 1-8). 

The material is to be found on page 34, 93, 158, 231, 291, 349, 407, 480, 608, 671, and 734, according to the index at the front.  It ought to be rescued and added to the Additional Fathers site.

The last item indicates that it continues: but I have not been able to locate the next volume online.

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CIL to be digitised at last?

Via Ancient World Online I learn of an initiative here to scan in the out-of-copyright volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.  This is very welcome news, so long as we get PDF’s out of the end of it.

It probably takes an initiative to do this.  The CIL is really important, in that it contains all the Latin inscriptions.  It also contains documentary texts. 

But the volumes are huge, rare, and impossible to get access to.  So no ordinary chap is ever going to be able to slap  them on a photocopier and do the necessary.  Indeed merely photocopying a page can be a challenge.

Let’s hope the volumes will be available in PDF.  The site seems to make access to this complex, if it is possible; but that is what we want, first and foremost.

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The Australian on “Scholarly licence to print money”

A correspondent draws my attention to an article in the Australian on the academic publishing business by Colin Steele (Jan. 25, 2012).  It’s sitting behind a paywall, but if you search in Google for “scholarly licence to print money” you can click through to it.

WHO pays the piper in scholarly publishing is a very hot global topic.

If scholarly publishing were to be established de novo in the digital era, the economics would surely be very different from the current model and taxpayers would get a better deal from their funding of university research.

Scholarly publishing, especially for the six or seven huge multi-national journal publishers, is one of the most lucrative global businesses. …

Steele then backs this up by some solid statistics.  The article continues:

The big publishers clearly manage the current peer review system and provide efficient electronic platforms for access but as the UK Office of Fair Trading reported in 2002, “the overall profitability of commercial STM publishing is high . . . by comparison to other commercial journal publishing”.  …

The academic community, supported through the salaries and infrastructure of the institutions, gives away its scholarly content to commercial publishers.

Peer reviewing of millions of articles is then undertaken, almost totally without charge, by that same academic community.

The publishers then impose restrictive copyright regulations on the scholarly content, which they then sell back at ever increasing profit margins to universities which originally created the material. Logical?

Not really.

I wish I could quote the whole article.  It’s very well thought out, and calls for Australian institutions to take back control of the research that they do, that they manage, and which the taxpayer pays for.  It concludes with the following:

Ultimately, the prime issue is surely to disseminate university knowledge, which has been funded by taxpayers, as effectively and openly as possible, rather than for that knowledge simply to continue to be a source for large publisher profits and for manipulable metrics for research assessment exercises.

And who, outside of the academic publishing industry, could disagree with that?

If you can read it, do so.

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Google’s personal search makes the search engine useless

I’d noticed for some time that I wasn’t getting very good results from searches on Google.  Kate Phizackerley explains why:

I really hate what Google has done with search.  If I search for the Valley of the Kings of KV64 I looking for something I don’t already know, for news.  It’s bad enough for Valley of the Kings and even worse for KV64 because my News from the Valley of the Kings is the top blog on the subject and I have written much of the material about KV64.

Google’s new personalised search algorithm makes matters worse.  It shrinks the world.  So as well as News from the Valley of the Kings, half of the images shown are photographs I took and the front pages adds my review of Nick Reeves’ Complete Valley of the Kings on Egyptological.  Far from helping me to find new material it shrinks my world, not just down to things I already know, but down to things I have written.  You’d have to be extremely narcissistic to like a search that works like that.

Fortunately it only works if you are logged in so I work with two browsers and only log in to Google on one of them, the other I use for searching.  I can see the advantage of geo-searches.  If I type in Sutton cinema, I like the fact search shows me the programme.  That is useful.  But not search which makes me the apparent centre of the World Wide Web.

That calls for a test.  So, I fired up Safari and went to the google.co.uk page and ran a test for “Roger Pearse”.  It gave one set of results.  Then I swapped over to IE, where I am logged into Google, and did the same — and I got another set.  They were not the same.

Neither set was particularly special.  But you’d expect consistency!

This is like the problem with Google Books Search where Google doesn’t show books to non-Americans — annoying but Europublishers threatened them — but worse, doesn’t show them in the search results so you never know that you’re missing them.

Stop it, Google.  Stop doing this kind of thing.  A search should give the same results.  Anything else is a pain in the butt, unless or until you can (a) see the modifiers being used, explicit, obvious, listed at the top of the page and (b) decide to turn them off.

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How do we search sites that no longer exist?

There’s a lot of material in the WaybackWhenMachine at Archive.org.  Images of websites from days gone by, full of material that may not be online now but that we might like to see if we could.

But how?  If we know the site, we can go to it and look through.

What we need is a Google for the WaybackWhenMachine.  And this does not seem to exist.

Anyone know of anything?

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A 1918 list of English translations from ancient Greek

This evening I ran across F. M. K. Foster’s English translations from the Greek: a bibliographical survey, Columbia, 1918 (Google books here).  A book of this date ought to be of great interest, in that all the translations listed will be public domain in the USA.  There’s even a good chance that they will be on Google Books or otherwise accessible.

I’m rather enjoying my first browse.  There are many pages of translations of Aristotle, and Euripides, of course.

But how many of us have heard of Aristoxenus of Tarentum? (p. 34 — from where I learn of a translation of his Harmonics).  Not me, that’s for sure.  But his book is here.

Or Artemidorus of Ephesus, better known as Artemidorus of Daldi, a 2nd century AD interpreter of dreams?  All the translations of his book, The interpretation of dreams, are old — 1722 is the last reprint shown.  I could not find it online.

Hyperides, The orations against Athenogenes and Philippides, were translated by F. G. Kenyon in 1893, I see.  There are quite a few versions of Longinus On the sublime — a work that perhaps few of us today have read (not me, again).

The lately discovered fragments of Menander, by “Unus Multorum” were edited and translated in 1909.  I had no luck finding it online, tho.

The list does not look nearly complete to me.  Likewise it omits all except classical Greek.  But the thing was done as a PhD thesis, under the lash, as it were, so perhaps we should not complain!

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Bodleian to relocate books “to Antarctica”

Yes, it’s true!  The Bodleian library, which receives all books in the UK for free from publishers, has moved all of its books to a large storage facility on a small island off Antarctica!

The Bodleian Libraries are 40 libraries serving Oxford University, including the Bodleian Library founded in 1602.

They are entitled to a copy of every book published in the UK and have been running out of space to store works for decades.

It will be predominantly low-usage books and maps which will be stored at the site …

Staff say that if a reader orders a book before 10am, the book will be fetched back to the central Oxford site “sometime”!  Now that’s service!

Librarian Sarah Thomas said: “This has been an important year in the history of the Bodleian.

“We have tagged and moved all our books, relocated our staff, prepared the New Bodleian building for its redevelopment, opened new facilities for readers in the heart of Oxford and refreshed and developed our IT capabilities.

They add:

The project to relocate the books is now complete and has been hailed as “an extraordinary success”.

Alright, I’m being sarcastic.  But not very; and those are real quotations from the BBC here.

What they’ve actually done is to build a warehouse in Swindon, 28 miles from Oxford, down a slow windy-twisty country lane and comes into town through a major traffic blackspot.

I think they must know that they’ve done something really stupid here.  Indeed I think we can tell that they’ve already had some flack for this one.

Why else would you put a “success” story out on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, unless you wanted no-one to see it?

If you lived in a sane world, you’d build the site on the outskirts of Oxford, on the ring road, perhaps 2-3 miles from the central Oxford site, and you’d build a light railway or monorail or something which ran continuously back and forth.  Wouldn’t you?

The only reason I can think of, for such a location, is that the price of building such a site in Oxford was made artificially high by the local council.  And a Google search reveals an Oxford Mail article stating that, yes, that this is exactly what happened.

Last year, the university was thwarted in its plans to build a £28m book depository on Oxford’s Osney Mead industrial estate after a long planning dispute, and has now bought the Swindon site.

And why?

John Tanner, city council cabinet member for a Cleaner, Greener Oxford, said: “It is a great pity if our planning decision has pushed Oxford’s Bodleian Library to Swindon….”

Green group leader Craig Simmons said: “It is good that the Bodleian was not allowed to build on a flood plain at Osney Mead…”

But there’s a sweeter plum still at the end of the Oxford Mail article, in response to criticism that shuttling books that distance by van wasn’t very “green”:

Dr Thomas said the books stored at Swindon would be predominantly low demand items and there would only be two deliveries a day to Oxford, significantly fewer than the 12 daily van journeys that  would have carried books from Osney Mead.

In which case, what use is the facility? Such is the corruption of our days, that the library actually boasts that its service will be of a poor standard, rather than apologising for it.

Honest men make things work, and do things efficiently.  But we all know what the children are like, of men who have made their own fortunes.  They tend to be spendthrifts.  They throw money away, and posture, expensively, with cash that they didn’t have to sweat to earn.

That’s what is happening here, as it does in the Third World.  Neither side cares about whether things actually work, or whether money is well spent.  Amour propre is more important.  The library is pleased to spite the council, and the councillors are pleased that they showed the library who is boss in order to protect the water-vole (or whatever).  The public interest be damned, it seems.

I don’t know whether the new folly storage facility has been named.  Perhaps I might propose something, that reflects all this.

Why don’t they name it after Paris Hilton?

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ZDMG online?

I have just discovered what looks like all the issues of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft online, for free, up to 2005, here:

http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/dmg/periodical/structure/2327

It includes indexes, supplements and all. You can’t download whole volumes, but you can download the individual articles you want.  The scans are greyscale, and good quality.

This journal is very important for Syriac studies, I know.  Probably for Arabic also.  And it’s all here.  Wow.

I’m deeply impressed, and I deeply approve.  This is what we want to see from an academic journal.  The fact that we don’t have the last few years doesn’t matter a bit, except to specialists.  For the rest of us it’s a bonanza.  It doesn’t really matter that you can’t download whole volumes — you don’t really need to.

This is the shape of the future.

The collection online also includes digital books which the publishers have given the OK to put online — specialised monographs from 20 years ago, which are out of print and so not earning a bean any longer.  Well done, the publishers.

Who says that Germany doesn’t get the internet?  (Me, that’s who — and I’ve said it pretty often)  Not any more, it seems.

I hope these items show up in search engines, by the way…

(H/t AWOL)

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Hunting for Ibn Abi Usaibia in Brockelmann

I want to know some details about an Arabic writer.  I look in Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, right?

It’s not very easy.  My first port of call was the index.  But this is in a strange order, and also heavily abbreviated.  After a lot of effort, I gave up.

My next thought was to look in the table of contents in each volume for “medezin” and look at each section.  Luckily I already know when he lived — he died in 1270 AD — so all I have to do is find the right one.  A search in the first edition draws a blank.  Ditto one in the last section of the 2nd ed.  But the latter does refer to “b.a.Us.” under each medical writer.  That’s our boy, of course, heavily abbreviated.  So he must be here somewhere.

Eventually I find, on p.265 of vol. 1 of the 2nd ed., in what is evidently the first section dedicated to medical writers, that it starts with a few general works.  And “Ibn a. Usaibi`a” is the first of these, and — blessedly — “S. 325/6”, i.e. look at p.325-6.  It also gives the edition as by Muller, Konigsberg, 1884, which is wrong — it’s Cairo, 1882.

Except p.325-6 doesn’t contain our boy.  “S” must mean “Supplement”, then?  Nope.  Suppl. 1, p.325 contains nothing of the kind.  Or is it supplement 2?  Nope.

Is it possible, is it really possible… that this muppet means “page 325-6 of the first edition”?  And … yes he does!  Hallelujah!  And it’s in section “personalgeschichte”, which means that the corresponding section in the supplement and 2nd edition should now be findable.  And indeed, on p.397-8 of the 2nd edition, there’s more about Ibn Abi Usaibia.  There’s even the numeral “325” in the margin.

I hope that I am giving some impression of the despair that anyone in a hurry must feel, confronted with this mess.   How we need some Arabist — or group of Arabists! — to produce a usable handbook!

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