Inscriptions of Libya Platform (in development)
The projected Inscriptions of Libya (InsLib) platform intends to offer a portal enabling search across the various corpora from a single point of access, bringing information about Libyan historical documents to a range of readers who might not have easy access to specialist scholarly literature of classical epigraphy. InsLib will be built using the EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) publishing tool that has been developed since 2017. InsLib will index texts and other epigraphic data from the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica, Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (including the ostraka from Bu Njem) and Inscriptions of Greek Cyrenaica/Greek Verse Inscriptions of Cyrenaica projects, all of which were published using the EpiDoc standard for encoding epigraphic documents. The intention is to add other Libyan texts (e.g. Punic inscriptions) to the index in later phases of work, as the publications become available in a compatible format.
InsLib will not republish or duplicate editions from the original publications, but rather index texts and data to provide consistent access to materials across different dates, regions, genres and languages. This information will be offered in several forms:
- Indices of Greek or Latin (and eventually other languages) words, names, titles, and similar entities in texts
- Typologies of text, object, material and other concepts, descriptive and historical metadata
- Location index, based on the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya
- Bibliographical concordance, based on secondary works cited
- Search and browse interface combining free text search and facets allowing users to filter results by category, location and date
All these index and search features will return lists of inscriptions and their contexts, and point readers to the original online publication. InsLib will therefore send new readers to these projects, rather than draw attention away from them.