Notizie degli Scavi On-line

Screencap of Notizie degli Scavi di Antichita' 1914 from archive.org
Skeletons found in the House of the Cryptoportico

As I was grading papers last term, I was really pleased to see that an undergraduate student had cited the Notizie degli Scavi di Antichita' in her paper on the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. Now, I'm teaching at the ICCS (a.k.a. the Centro) in Rome this academic year, and the student was a characteristically sharp and gung-ho centrista, so this sort of spirited pursuit of the raw stuff of an excavation was not entirely unexpected. But what surprised me was where she had found the Notizie -- on-line.

Perhaps this isn't news to fellow bloggers, but a number of Notizie degli Scavi volumes have been expertly scanned and posted on archive.org. Check it out for yourself. I haven't experimented with all the interfaces, but the handy flip-book option is like browsing, well, a real book (that's the screencap above). You can zoom in and get a closer look at the pictures or text, and -- best of all, from my perspective -- you can even do a search of the journal's text. The run of scanned volumes appears to start with 1878 and end with 1924, and I believe it is even downloadable for poolside Motel Villa dei Misteri pleasure reading.

Though the debate about digitizing books will undoubtedly rage on, this development certainly aids the research of people (like me) who don't usually have a full-run of the NSA at their fingertips. And even for our students who don't have Italian, such a resource might nevertheless open up possibilities for assignments or for interactive demonstrations of how we know what we know about sites like Pompeii.