Jocelyn Penny Small, Rutgers University "How is a database not like a book?"

The topics a book and a database cover may be the same. The time it takes to produce both may be the same. The audience may be the same. The review process and publishers may be the same. But there it pretty much stops. While publication signals finality for a book, a database is rarely finished. A book can be read one hundred years later. A database will have died by then, unless it has been carefully nurtured through myriad software and hardware changes over those hundred years. So why bother with a database at all? It is the ability to find precisely the information you want from enormous sets of data that separates the database from the book. It is the ability to ask kinds of questions that just aren't feasible from books.

This talk will explore these issues and others that distinguish books from databases, using as examples the "Sibyl" database of iconographical data from U.S. museums and the LIMC: Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, a multi-volume paper-based reference work. The presenter will discuss the kinds of research that cannot even be conceived of by those working strictly with the LIMC or other "hard copy" works, and how the database format of Sibyl allows scholars to ask new kinds of iconographical questions. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet, the database can now be constantly revised and expanded, not just by its orginal author, but by anyone who is granted access to it.