The Digital South Caucasus Collection (DSCC) is a collection in the Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL), a project of the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University. AWDL’s mission is to identify, collect, curate, and provide access to a broad range of scholarly materials relevant to the study of the ancient world.
In 2018 the ISAW Library, in collaboration with Dr. Karen Rubinson, partnered with academic and scientific institutions in the South Caucasus to digitize, catalog, preserve and serve digital copies of archaeological and historical research on the ancient South Caucasus region.
At present, our two partners are the Georgian National Museum (GNM) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. Both institutions granted the ISAW Library the right to serve in the DSCC digital copies of all relevant scholarship published by their institutions, as well as by predecessor organizations to whose rights they succeeded, such as the Institute of Archaeology in the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR.
The ISAW Library is responsible for curating the collection, clearing the rights as needed, preserving the digital copies in NYU’s Faculty Digital Archive, creating high-quality metadata in order to maximize discoverability, and making the works accessible to the general scholarly public. Please follow this link and this link for more information about our rights-clearing process and the fair use doctrine at NYU, respectively.
As of March 2025, DSCC is in beta release. If you have suggestions for corrections, updates, etc., please email us at isaw-dscc@nyu.edu.
In the first phase of development (2021–2024), the DSCC digitized scholarly materials published by the GNM. It also completed the technical development of the underlying digital infrastructure for the digital library. This phase was funded in part by a grant from the US Embassy in Tbilisi (Cultural and Educational Small Grants Program), which helped to defray the digitization of 39,483 pages of scholarly materials published by the GNM and its predecessor institutions, while ISAW/NYU took responsibility for the technical development of the digital infrastructure and portal of the digital library. The DSCC is hoping in future phases to expand the digitization program to Armenian and Azerbaijani archaeological and historical institutes; optimize the ingest of born-digital materials and organize a pipeline for ongoing accession of current scholarship; enhance metadata recording and cataloging; and refine the DSCC Discovery Portal.
The ISAW Library would like to recognize the work of Dr. Patrick J. Burns (ISAW Library), Dr. Karen Rubinson (ISAW), Dr. Giorgi Bedianashvili (Institute of Archaeology, Georgian National Museum), Dr. David Lordkipanidze (Director, Georgian National Museum), Ana Tskhvedadze, Jasmine Smith, Christian Casey, and the Society of Young Archaeologists of Georgia, all of whom made significant contributions to the realization of this project.
If you are an author or publisher who would like to partner with the ISAW Library by adding to the DSCC collection, please use this form or email us at isaw-dscc@nyu.edu.
Partners
- Georgian National Museum
- Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
- Society of Young Archaeologists of Georgia
Project Team (2018-present)
- Giorgi Bedianashvili
- Patrick J. Burns
- Christian Casey
- Gabriel Mckee
- David M. Ratzan
- Karen Rubinson
- Jasmine Smith
- Ana Tskhvedadze