Since its founding in 1881, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens has amassed a huge collection of both published and unpublished information. This includes books, journals, photographs, excavation notebooks, personal papers, maps, and scientific data sets. One of the major initiatives of the School in recent years has been to digitize these resources into an ASCSA Digital Library, which is actually a collection of several databases either administered directly by the School or in conjunction with other institutions. This page provides a central point of access to these major digital resources. For additional information not included here, please consult the main pages for the Research Facilities of the School.

The School would like to thank the Packard Foundation and Packard Humanities Institute, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Office of Regional Development of the European Union, Greek Ministry of Culture, Third Information Society of the European Union, European Economic Area (EEA), and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, all of whom have supplied funding to help the ASCSA become a leader in digital resources in the humanities.

Links to the Digital Library

ASCSA Multimedia Presentations
Streaming multimedia presentations are online for the Excavations at Ancient Corinth, the Excavations of the Athenian Agora, the Gennadius Library, and the Dorothy Burr Thompson Archive of photos from the 1920’s and 30’s. These graphics-rich modules are well suited for teaching purposes and serve as a wonderful introduction to the School.

AMBROSIA: The Union Catalogue of the Libraries
The AMerican BRitish Online Search in Athens (AMBROSIA) database is an on-line union catalogue representing the holdings of the adjacent libraries of the British School at Athens and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which includes the Blegen and Gennadius libraries. Based on Ex Libris’s ALEPH software platform, used by libraries around the world, AMBROSIA not only provides access to the records of printed materials, but also gives authenticated users full-text online access to journals, databases, and e-books; including those produced by the American School’s Publications Office.

ASCSA.net: Interdepartmental Database of the Agora and Corinth Excavations
The ascsa.net digital library currently provides access to the archaeological data from the Athenian Agora and Corinth together with a selection of photographs from the Alison Frantz Collection that pertain to these excavations.  Searches can be made across these collections or they can be queried separately. Publications, excavation reports, excavation notebooks, contexts, objects, plans and drawings, and photos and other images can be searched using the Agora or Corinth field names, as well as the Dublin Core metadata standard set.  Users can tailor the display of their search results in many formats such as list, icons (thumbnail), and table.  The table display format is especially flexible with individual fields specified by the user.  Find spots for objects from the Athenian Agora and from the recent Panayia Field excavations in Corinth can be plotted in Google Earth or on excavation plans (Agora only at present).  Search results may also be exported into four file formats. For additional excavations data information, consult Corinth or Agora Digital Resource pages.

Alison Frantz Photographic Collection
The complete Frantz collection (not just the database subset as listed in ascsa.net above) contains images by the photographer and archaeologist Alison Frantz [1903–1995]. The photographs mainly depict Archaic and Classical sculpture, Greek archaeological sites and various finds throughout mainland Greece and the Greek islands plus Albania, Turkey, and Italy. The collection was created between the late 1940s and the early 1970s.

Archaeological Photographic Collection
This important photographic collection documents the field activities of the American School from its establishment in 1881 until WW II, with valuable and rare images recording the restoration work of architect Nikolaos Balanos at the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in the early 20th century, the identification of the Choregic Monument of Nikias on the South Slope of the Acropolis, the discovery of the Sanctuary of Eros and Aphrodite on the North Slope of the Acropolis in the 1930’s, the excavations at the site of Dionysus in northern Attica, the restoration of the Lion of Amphipolis, as well as general views of Athens.

Dorothy Burr Thompson Collection
Dorothy Burr Thompson [1900–2001], who is known to the world of Greek archaeology as an excavator and leading expert in ancient terracottas, donated her photographic collection to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The collection, which covers the period 1923–1955, includes images from Thompson’s travels in Greece, Turkey and Italy. In addition to the archaeological information, some of which has been lost or forgotten, the collection is a mosaic of information about architecture, landscapes and customs that no longer exist. Her pictures are historical documents.

Historical Archives of the Gennadius Library
Access to a considerable number of photographs which were dispersed at the historical collections of the Archives in the Gennadius Library. These images are of great interest since they document public and private moments of the Greek history, from the late 19th to the early decades of the 20th century. The photos originated from the rich archive of the Dragoumis family, the papers of Athanasios Souliotis, Nikolaos Mavris and others, as well as from the papers of author Stratis Myrivilis who fought in the Balkan Wars and the Greek-Turkish War (1919–1922).

Correspondence of Ion Dragoumis
Database of Ion Dragoumis’ correspondence, which includes 11,409 digital images of letters. Ion St. Dragoumis, member of the Dragoumis family, served initially as a diplomat in Istanbul, Rome and St. Petersburg, before becoming member of the Greek Parliament. Dragoumis was assassinated in 1920. The collection, which comprises 2,827 incoming letters and a small number of outgoing ones, covers the period 1895–1920. The Macedonian struggle, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, the Greek language and the use of the Demotic, are some of the issues that appear in Dragoumis’ correspondence.

Scrapbooks of John (Joannes) Gennadius
The scrapbooks of Joannes Gennadius are one of the most important collections of the Gennadius library, because they contain invaluable information for the history of modern Greece. In his scrapbooks, Gennadius collected photos and other ephemera (clippings from newspapers and books, engravings, printed matter, broadsides, invitations and many other materials). The 116 volumes of the scrapbooks focus on diverse topics: historical, topographical, archaeological, ethnological (costumes), architectural, art historical, history of the book, journalistic as well as the Gennadius family. Each volume consists on the average of 60-70 pages of large size.

Mapping Mediterranean Lands
This web-based catalog of significant early and unique maps of the Mediterranean region from the Gennadius Library is part of the Digital Library for International Research, and was conducted under the aegis of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. Spanning a period from the late fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, these maps are either drawn in hand or were printed by noted cartographers and map publishers. Among many important maps may be noted the series of island maps in the Ionian and Aegean seas from a fifteenth century manuscript of Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum, an early nineteenth century chart of the Aegean by Nicolas Kefalas (possibly the first printed Greek nautical chart), and numerous maps concerned with the political development of the Balkan states in the late nineteenth century.