L'Année philologique

L’Année philologique is published, or has been published, in several forms:

• a printed volume that appears each year in summer. A minimum of one and a half years’ delay occurs between the publication of a work and its eventual listing in APh ;
• microfiches. In the early 1980s volumes 1 (1924-1926) through 44 (1973) were available in this form. This method of publication was not successful and was discontinued ;
• two CD-ROMs comprising the Database of Classical Bibliography (DCB). Version 2, published in 1997, contained volumes 45-60. The production of CD-ROMs compatible with both PC and Macintosh platforms became too costly, which explains in part why this format was not continued ;
• an electronic version called AnPhilNet, created by Richard Goulet from the AnPhil data. AnPhilNet was available on the Internet at no charge from 1999-2002. It contained only the data compiled since the digitization of L’Année philologique (volumes 66-70) ;
• since 2002 an on-line database «L’Année philologique sur Internet» has existed, available by subscription. This is an Oracle Database managed by Éric Rebillard, former co-director of L’Année philologique. The database currently contains the data from volumes 20 (1949) to 77 (2006).

Use of the most recently-printed volume is almost indispensable for every specialist who wishes to take into account scholarly work not yet indexed in previous volumes by perusing a rubric of the first part, or a section of the second part, especially if these have copious entries (as is the case, for example, with the rubric Testamenta, or the Archaeology section). This is the rationale for making, since October 2008, a print image of the volume itself available for browsing on the online data base in a protected PDF format. The value of the printed Index nominum antiquorum, Index geographicus, and Index nominum recentiorum should also be emphasized, each of which has no equivalent in the online database. On the other hand, consultation of the online database allows the user to collect rapidly everything that appears in the printed volume on a given subject – and even, by use of the full-text search, to compensate to a certain extent for the absence of a keyword search. Thus a user who is interested in poison in antiquity (and is equipped with the necessary linguistic knowledge) could find entries in the database having the words « poison » (English, French), « Gift » (German), « veleno » (Italian), « veneno » (Spanish), etc.

In sum, by offering respectively a synchronic and a diachronic view of scholarly production, the printed volume and the online database complement each other rather than truly competing with or duplicating each other.