This means that an important milestone has been reached for the project funded by the German Research Foundation since 2017 within the framework of the Specialised Information Service for Classical Studies – Propylaeum. Its goal has been the transfer of the database into the infrastructure of the Bavarian Library Association and the setup of a new search interface by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. This serves to ensure reliable operation in the future. Moreover, the efficiency of compilation can be increased substantially.

Gnomon Bibliographic Database

At the new address (http://gbd.digital) the user initially finds the titles already newly catalogued since April 2018 in the B3Kat, the joint union catalogue of the Bavarian Library Association and the Cooperative Library Association of Berlin-Brandenburg. In the course of the coming months, the complete old data will be migrated successively as well. Further, the data of the Gnomon Bibliographic Database will be incorporated with daily updates in PropylaeumSEARCH, the central meta search portal of the Specialised Information Service for Classical Studies.

PropylaeumSEARCH

In the course of the transfer to the library infrastructure, the publishing house C.H. Beck, as a long-term partner of the database project, has made it possible that in the future all data within the scope of the overall union catalogue will be available as open data for free further use. This means that the data of the Gnomon Bibliographic Database can henceforth also become part of linked-open-data networks and classical studies research platforms. For this purpose, the complementation of the data sets with authority data and identifiers will be pushed further ahead during the second funding phase up to 2021.

https://www.bib-bvb.de/web/b3kat/open-data

With over 600,000 entries, the Gnomon Bibliographic Database is one of the most extensive database systems for specialist literature in the overall field of classical studies, including the subject-specific history of scholarship and science. It includes monographs, collective volumes with the contributions contained in them, journal articles, reviews and specialised encyclopaedias from the period in all relevant scholarly languages, which can be researched in detail with the aid of an extensive, multilingual thesaurus (currently around 25,000 subject headings). The indexing of YouTube contents and Internet resources currently represents a unique feature of the database.

The Gnomon Bibliographic Database was devised at the end of the 1980s by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Malitz (Eichstätt/ Freiburg), who acts as the editor of the database up to the present, since 2003 in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Gregor Weber (Augsburg). They are supported by Prof. Dr. Michael Rathmann (Eichstätt) and Dr. Andreas Hartmann (Augsburg). As of 1994, contents were initially published on disk or CD ROM by the publishing house C.H. Beck, which is still associated in partnership up to the present day. As of 1996, regularly updated extracts from the database were made available on the Internet under the title "Gnomon Online". Due to an agreement with the publishing house C.H. Beck, the complete data stock could be made freely usable on the Internet in 2009.

The indexing work is carried out by the university chairs of ancient history in Augsburg and Eichstätt. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) and the University Libraries of Augsburg, Eichstätt and Tübingen have been close cooperation partners for a long time. Further cooperation partners are the editorial office of the journal Gnomon (Munich) and the Joint Library of the Hellenic & Roman Societies (London). Moreover, a cooperation agreement was concluded with the German Archaeological Institute.

A more detailed description of the development history of the Gnomon Bibliographic Database, which also gives insight into the technical hurdles that still had to be overcome during the last decades of the past century, can be found at:

Malitz, Jürgen: ConcEyst, GBD und NBE: drei Computerprojekte am Eichstätter Lehrstuhl für Alte Geschichte. In: Hartmann, Andreas; Weber, Gregor (ed.): Zwischen Antike und Moderne: Festschrift für Jürgen Malitz zum 65. Geburtstag. Speyer, 2012. p. 15-36, here 23-33. Available on: http://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeumdok.00001419 [Last access 06/05/2019].

[Source: Press release of the University of Augsburg dated 6 May 2019]