The Digital South Caucasus Collection (DSCC) is a collection in the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL), a project of the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University. AWDL’s mission is to identify, collect, curate, and provide access to a broad range of scholarly materials relevant to the study of the ancient world.
In 2018 the ISAW Library, in collaboration with Dr. Karen Rubinson, partnered with academic and scientific institutions in the South Caucasus to digitize, catalog, preserve and serve digital copies of archaeological and historical research on the ancient South Caucasus region.
At present, our two partners are the Georgian National Museum and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. Both institutions granted the ISAW Library the right to serve in the DSCC digital copies of all relevant scholarship published by their institutions, as well as by predecessor organizations to whose rights they succeeded, such as the Institute of Archaeology in the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR.
The ISAW Library is responsible for curating the collection, clearing the rights as needed, preserving the digital copies in NYU’s Faculty Digital Archive, creating high-quality metadata in order to maximize discoverability, and making the works accessible to the general scholarly public. (Please follow this link and this link for more information about our rights-clearing process and the fair use doctrine at NYU, respectively.)
We are currently in the process of scoping and digitizing items of relevant scholarship and building out the technical infrastructure of the DSCC site. We would like to thank in particular the members of the Society of Young Archaeologists of Georgia for their help in the initial phases of this project.
We anticipate a soft launch of the DSCC in the Spring of 2024.
The initial technical development of the DSCC, including the digitization of scholarly materials held by the Georgian National Museum, was supported by the Cultural Small Grants Program of the United States Embassy in Georgia.
If you are an author or publisher who would like to partner with the ISAW Library by adding to the DSCC collection, please email ISAW-Library@nyu.edu.
Partners
- Georgian National Museum
- Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
- Society of Young Archaeologists of Georgia
Project Team (2018-present)
- Giorgi Bedianashvili
- Patrick J. Burns
- Christian Casey
- Gabriel Mckee
- David M. Ratzan
- Karen Rubinson
- Jasmine Smith
- Ana Tskhvedadze