At long last, the library has access to L’Annee philologique, the most important database for the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. L’Annee reflects the international and multidisciplinary nature of classical studies, indexing books, articles, and conference papers from around the world in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. (You will often find that the abstract to an article is written in a different language than the article itself.) Whether you’re searching for information on the Presocratics, the Homeric Hymns, the archaeological remains of Pompei, or ancient science and technology, you will find highly relevant and dependable sources here. L’Annee philologique online is based on the print index of the same name that has been a standard for years among classics scholars. Current online coverage is from print volume 30 (1959) to volume 74 (2003). You can search by Modern Author, Ancient Author, Full Text, Subjects and disciplines, Date, and other criteria. In the case of “Full Text”, this does not mean that you can search the entire contents of articles–this is NOT a full text database. Rather, it means that you can search the entire contents of the article records. This is unusual terminology for users in the United States and reflects L’annee’s European origin. There are some other important features that might be surprising to non-classicist American users. For the Ancient Author search, you need to input the latinized version of a name, so for instance “liuius”, not “livy”. To search for “livy”, do the Full Text search. Complex searches are also handled differently. You have to build up your search step by step. To combine a Modern Author search with, say, a Subject search, you have to first do the author search, then the subject search, and finally combine the two searches using the boolean operator AND. Once you’ve done all the simple searches describing your topic (and you can have many), the combining and recombining of search sets–using AND, OR, and NOT–is made easy and efficient. Unfortunately, the Help pages to this database are sparse. Below I’ve listed a bunch of academic library tutorials that I found useful:

• http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/useits/annee_phil/annee-philologique.html
• http://www.library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/lannee/index.html
• http://www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/APhGuide.html.

–Fred Rowland