A Truly Offsite Library: Columbia’s Library at Dakhleh
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WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Columbia’s Library at Dakhleh
Many of us are responsible for offsite library collections. They may be in facilities elsewhere in our city, or in special offsite storage in a different city or state. I wonder, though, how many of us are responsible for library collections that are over 5600 miles away from our home institutions?
In addition to being the librarian for Ancient & Medieval History and Religion at Columbia University in New York City, I also oversee a small collection located in the Dakhleh Oasis in western Egypt. This small and very targeted library serves undergraduate research and team reference needs for an archaeological excavation overseen by Dr. Roger Bagnall, currently director of NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The excavation, begun in 2004 and continuing every February since, is uncovering the 4th-century Graeco-Roman city of Amheida—known as Trimithis in antiquity.
The genesis of the project as a whole was in Bagnall’s own experience at an excavation in the 1990s, at the Red Sea site of Berenike. He was already interested in the site at Amheida and, set down among the Berenike team’s sleeping tents and trench latrines, he formed a different notion for his own foray into dig direction. At the time a Columbia University professor of Classics, he successfully raised enough money from Columbia’s Academic Quality Fund to build a large, two-storey complex on the town border of Mut and Sheikh-Wally in Egypt’s Western Desert. Bagnall conceived the project as a semester-long teaching experience for students: one month of research seminar, one month of excavation, and one month of travel. The dig house, inspired by local mud-brick architecture, could house the dig team and the students, and also featured a large dining room, storage rooms, a darkroom, a registry, a computer lab…and a library, funded by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation.
The library, currently holding between 450 and 500 titles, covers a wide range of subjects (you can find the full catalog here). For the purposes of undergraduate research, there are general histories of ancient and Graeco-Roman Egypt, as well as introductions to archaeological methodology. Collections of primary source materials, such as the Oxyrhynchus papyri series, share space with field reports from other excavations in the region, such as Kellis in Dakhleh, and Hibis and Bagawat in the nearby oasis of Kharga. The dig team, an international group comprised of Italians, Dutch, Belgians, and French, among others, can find works on Egyptian glass and ceramics, or the techniques of mud-brick architecture.
My own involvement in the collection began in 2002, when I assumed my current position at Columbia. My predecessor, working with Dr Bagnall, had begun assembling a basic collection, but the kickoff date for the project was delayed two years running and the books—about 220 of them—were still stored in a corner of our Course Reserves stacks when I took over. In mid-2003, when the green light was lit for the inaugural season, I asked Dr Bagnall how the books were going to get to Egypt: “Oh, I assumed you and I would take them over,” he replied.
And so we did, in November 2003. We shipped the boxes over through the kind auspices of the American University in Cairo. Bagnall and I picked them up and took them on the 12-hour drive down the oasis road to Dakhleh and, after getting the books set up, we toured Graeco-Roman sites in Dakhleh, Kharga, and—back north again—in Cairo and Alexandria. It was during this trip that Bagnall decided that I would be a better librarian if I had a clearer understanding of the project itself, and the plan was set that I would return regularly for 2-3 weeks during the February dig season. I have worked on the excavation database, assisted the conservator, and helped out in the field, learning more about the context, the history, and the process with each visit. As a result, it is just as often I who suggest a title to add to the collection as it is the dig directors. Being on site also facilitates the title suggestions offered by many of the team members, from multilingual dictionaries of architectural terms to guides to the birds of Egypt. My presence also guarantees that the books (which are boxed between March and December to protect them from the sand that sifts even through sealed and shuttered windows) are properly shelved and that new titles purchased in Egypt are still processed according to our standards. (On this last count: I tend to arrive in late January with spine labels issued for books purchased the previous season; I attach the heat-sensitive labels by warming a knife blade in the flame of a gas burner and carefully applying it to the spine. Gonzo librarianship.)
In 2007, sponsorship of the dig—and of the undergraduate program—passed from Columbia to NYU, upon Bagnall’s ascension to director of ISAW. The library remains in Columbia’s—and my—hands, however. Its records are in our OPAC, the books are processed by our acquisitions, cataloging, and labeling staff—an arrangement that I hope will exist for some time to come. It is a very gratifying experience for a librarian of ancient history to have responsibilities that reach so literally into a corner of the ancient world.
Karen Green
klg19@columbia.edu
WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Columbia’s Library at Dakhleh
