Research Databases & Digital Collections

The New Surveys in the Classics are a series of short books dedicated to key themes and concepts in the classical world. They deal with a wide range of topics, from key figures like Homer and Virgil to subjects such as Greek tragedy, thought and science, women, slavery, Roman religion, and satire. The AAR Library’s online subscription covers C. Steel, Roman Oratory (2006), N. J. Lowe, Comedy (2007), N. Livingstone and G. Nisbet, Epigram (2008), D. Spencer, Roman Landscape (2009), the second edition of B. A. Sparkes, Greek Art (2010), the second edition of R. Rutherford, Homer (2011), S. Harrison, Horace (2012), P. Gainsford, Early Greek Hexameter Poetry (2013), P.J. Finglass, Sophocles (2014), M. Bonazzi, The Sophists (2015), the second edition of J. N. Bremmer, Greek religion (2016), G. Roskam, Plutarch (2017). The volumes prior to 2006 are available in the library.

The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the remarkable private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). Cicognara’s collection of some five thousand early imprints still comprises the foundational literature of art and archaeology.

The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the remarkable private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). Cicognara’s collection of some five thousand early imprints still comprises the foundational literature of art and archaeology.

Full-text access to many publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “five decades of publications on art history, to read, download, and/or search for free.”

The Digital Humanities Center (DHC) of the American Academy in Rome unites the Academy’s archival resources in one single search interface. The DHC contains thousands of descriptions (metadata) of archival objects and digital objects (photographs and digitized texs) from the Academy’s Institutional Archive, the Photographic Archive, the Archaeological Study Collection, the Regia and Cosa excavations, and other archival collections.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), operated by the Bielefeld University Library, is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic open-access web resources. More and more repository servers come into being which use the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for providing their contents. BASE collects, normalizes, and indexes these data. BASE provides more than seventy million documents from more than three thousand sources. You can access the full texts of about 70 percent of the indexed documents.

The Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PMBZ) is a comprehensive biographical dictionary for the Byzantine Empire in the early medieval period (641–1025 AD) documenting more than twenty-one thousand persons. PMBZ Online is based on the print edition of the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (1998, 2013). PMBZ documents all persons mentioned either by name or anonymously in the relevant Byzantine and non-Byzantine sources, and secondly all persons mentioned in the Byzantine sources both from Western Europe and from the Arabic and Slavonic areas, together with those from the Christian East.

The Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PMBZ) is a comprehensive biographical dictionary for the Byzantine Empire in the early medieval period (641–1025 AD) documenting more than twenty-one thousand persons. PMBZ Online is based on the print edition of the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (1998, 2013). PMBZ documents all persons mentioned either by name or anonymously in the relevant Byzantine and non-Byzantine sources, and secondly all persons mentioned in the Byzantine sources both from Western Europe and from the Arabic and Slavonic areas, together with those from the Christian East.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) project began in 1894 and is scheduled to be completed around the year 2050. TLL is not only the largest Latin dictionary in the world, but also the first one to cover all the texts from the classical period up to about 600 AD. For more information on the ThLL, click here. In addition to owning the print version, AAR subscribed to the online database (issued by de Gruyter) that covers all of the content that is also available in print. The TLL open access provides PDF files of the print version.

The AAR Library’s subscription to the Oxford Reference Works covers various disciplines: The Oxford Companion to Archaeology and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology cover archaeology, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization and to Classical Literature, the Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, and Who’s Who in the Classical World cover classics.

For postclassical art and architecture, there are the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, of Modern Design, and& of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, of Architecture, of Art, and of Art and Artists; further The Oxford Companion to the Garden, to the Photograph, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and else.

For literature (including theater performance), there are, among others, reference works on world literature in general, on English-language literature in particular: The Oxford Companion to American Literature, to the American Theatre, to Theatre and Performance, to Shakespeare, to English Literature, to Modern Poetry, and to Classical Literature, The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, to American Literature, to English Literature, and to the Theatre; A Dictionary on Critical Theory, on Writers and their Works, of Literary Terms, of Plays, and of Science Fiction, and else.

History is covered by a wide range of topics, epochs, and geographic areas: The Oxford Companion to the United States History, to World War II, to Military History and to American Military History; An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age; The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and of the Renaissance; A Dictionary of World History, of Contemporary World History, and of English Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000; Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and of the Middle Ages, Who’s Who in the Twentieth Century, and else.

Religion and the history of religions are covered by The Oxford Companion to the Bible, to World Mythology; A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion; The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, of Saints; The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, of World Religions; A Dictionary of Buddhism, of Hinduism, of Popes, of the Bible, of African Mythology, of Asian Mythology, of Celtic Mythology, of Creation Myths, of World Mythology, and of Superstitions; The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation.

Philosophy is covered by The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, to the Mind, and to Consciousness, and The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Furthermore, there are some reference works on social sciences and political sciences, also in a broader sense: The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, and of World Place-Names; The Oxford Guide to the United States Government; A Dictionary of Critical Theory, of Ecology, of Economy, of Education, of Geography, and of Human Geography, of Sociology, and of the Social Sciences.

Music (including opera, musicals, and dance) is covered by The Oxford Companion to Music, to the American Musical; The Oxford Dictionary of Music and of Dance, A Dictionary of Opera Characters, The Grove Book of Opera Singers and of Operas,

Dictionaries and language reference: The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary (English-Latin and Latin-English), The Pocket Oxford Italian Dictionary (English-Italian and Italian-English) and also other languages. Furthermore, there are many reference works covering the English language (etymology, abbreviations, grammar, eponyms, rhyming, idioms, proverbs, phrase and fable, reference and allusion, word origins, foreign terms, slang, American usage and style, modern English usage, and scientific writing).