“… or equivalent combination of experience and education”

Though I did not set out as a young man to be a librarian, I have now spent a third of a century engaged in that profession. Over the course of my career I have been employed as a librarian by four institutions. Three of them were small, comparatively independent institutions populated by communities of scholars directly engaged in the study of antiquity and the fourth, where I now work, is a large research university. While quite different from one another in many ways, a central component of my own responsibility in each has been collection development and specialized reference service to local and distant scholars and students engaged in the advanced study of antiquity. It was not until I undertook my current position that I had any substantial engagement with undergraduate students, or worked in a large team of librarians representing specializations and disciplines spanning the full spectrum of a large university and a broad range of interests in the discipline of librarianship. Each of these institutions offered its own unique set of challenges and rewards, but at each I have been given what seems in retrospect to have been a remarkable degree of freedom and encouragement to pursue my own areas of interest as they developed over the years.

If forced to characterize the core of my own philosophy, I would say that I am fully committed to the principle that libraries are fundamental stakeholders in the development and implementation of new forms of knowledge management, and that both print and emerging technologies—and the developing relationships between and among them—are essential components of the scholarly conversation. With that in mind, I have participated in partnerships and undertaken my own projects seeking to engage the community of scholars while broadening access to both newer and older modes of scholarly publication. The pair of projects, Abzu¹ and AWOL², initiated more than 20 years ago, represent probably the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline. While by many measures they have been successful—and personally gratifying and useful to the field—they remain a provisional and inadequate work-around for the problem of integrating print and digital scholarship. Digital humanities, and digital scholarship more generally, despite rapid development over the last quarter century, is still in its infancy. Already a decade ago Gregory Crane and his colleagues were calling for the field of classics, to move beyond “incunabular assumptions” embodied in many digital collections (Crane et al. 2006). While many individuals and projects have heeded their call, the publishing industry which controls so much of what scholars do with the product of their work, perpetuates these incunabular assumptions. Because the means to produce scholarship in digital form are in the backpacks and on the desks of all scholars, and because sharing this scholarship over long distances is so simple, the development of digital scholarship has been both democratic and chaotic: A thousand flowers bloom, but there is no garden. Through Abzu and AWOL, I try to see some patterns in the chaos.

I entered graduate school at The University of Chicago in 1976 with the intention of studying the history of the ancient Near East. At the time, I imagined I would complete my graduate studies and then teach history at the secondary school level, though I had only the vaguest notion of what that might mean in any realistic sense. I was not a particularly talented student, but I was persistent and was fortunate to study under a quite extraordinary community of scholars (and an exceptionally talented cohort of fellow graduate students). We tried to read everything, and we worked collaboratively to support and challenge one another as we worked our way through the core areas of philology, archaeology, and history of our specializations in Assyriology, Egyptology, Hittitology, and Northwest Semitics. Many among this group of students have gone on to become distinguished scholars and teachers. I am fortunate to count many of my teachers and fellow students among my oldest and best friends.

Like most students of the ancient Near East in Chicago, I spent...