Gnomon Bibliographic Database

The Gnomon Bibliographic Database (GBD) is one of the most extensive database systems in Classical Studies, comprising  750.000 entries of specialized literature, including entries on the history of scholarship. The database lists monographies, edited volumes with all contributions, journal articles, reviews, and dictionaries from all of the modern era and in all academic languages, all of which are researchable in detail with a comprehensive, multinlingual thesaurus (currently ca. 25.000 catchwords). Monographs are also indexed with the vocabulary of the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND). The indexing of YouTube-material and other internet ressources is at the moment a unique characteristic of GBD. The database results from a long-standing and intensive collaboration of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Bavarian State Library (Munich) with the University Libraries of Augsburg, Eichstätt, and Tübingen. There are also existing cooperations with the editorial team of the journal Gnomon (Munich) and the Joint Library of the Hellenic & Roman Societies (London). Moreover, there is a cooperation agreement with the German Archaeological Institute; in the context of a CLARIN-D project, first attempts at new types of visualization have been tested on the basis of a shared data pool of GBD and ZENON.

In the context of the DFG-sponsored “Fachinformationsdienst Altertumswissenschaften“ the GBD has been migrated into B3Kat (the joint union catalogue of the Bavarian Library Catalogue (BVB) and the Library Catalogue of Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV)) from 2016-2018. The new collection of data has thus analyzed all newly acquired titles catalogued in a BVB- or KOBV-library since April 2018. In addition, data sets from London are integrated. The search engine provided by the Bavarian State Library enables the access to all collected data on a daily basis, including the data entered into the Metasearch engine PropylaeumSearch.

Initially, the GBD had been conceptualized by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Malitz (Eichstätt) at the end of the 1980s. Malitz has served as the data bases’ main editor until today, since 2003 together with Prof. Dr. Gregor Weber (Augsburg). From 1994 onwards, the data sets were first published with floppy disks and CDs by publishing house C. H. Beck that has supported the project up to the present. Since 1996, updated excerpts of the database were made available via the internet under the label Gnomon Online. After an agreement with C. H. Beck in 2009, the entire data pool was granted open access. Following the termination of the migration into B3Kat, all data will be made available in the framework of the open data pool of the union catalogue (https://www.bib-bvb.de/web/b3kat/open-data) for free re-use under a CC0-license.

A comprehensive account of the GBD’s history, including the various technical obstacles that had tob e overcome during the last decade of the last century, can be found in:

Jürgen Malitz: ConcEyst, GBD und NBE. Drei Computerprojekte am Eichstätter Lehrstuhl für Alte Geschichte. In: Andreas Hartmann/Gregor Weber (Hg.), Zwischen Antike und Moderne. Festschrift für Jürgen Malitz zum 65. Geburtstag, Speyer 2012, 15-36, hier 23-33. Online: http://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeumdok.00001419.