Improving Access To Various Books On The Roman Empire

[DanM]

Maybe no one else will think this is a good idea, but I want to put it out there for discussion.

 

For as long as I have been reading about the Roman Empire, my single biggest obstical has been just tying to find books on particular subjects. For example, if you want to study a comparison of the various heretical faiths of the Latter Roman Empire, where do you go to look for information on this subject? What about the decline of the cities in the Latter Empire? What about changes in military tactics from the Principate to the Later Empire or a study of Persian military tactics of the 6th century?

 

Its easy to find the fun, light overviews like the works of John Julius Norwich, but its not so easy to find detailed analysis of very specific aspects of Roman history.

 

Of course you can try Amazon or Alibris or one of the other websites, but its really a hunt and peck kind of process. Searching by subject or keywords will not always help you get the desired result. Additionally, non-academics like myself have huge gaps in our knowledge and understanding that further impair our search. Maybe I am the only guy who has trouble finding all of the reading material he would wish to read on a particular subject, but I suspect there are others who would also like to find a solution to this problem.

 

The solution I would like to suggest is something that could be done with minimal effort on this board. I would like to suggest we have a section where members could go to look up all of the listed books by subject and/or author. For example, in our ask the professor thread I learned about the works of J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz. Liebeschuetz wrote some very good books on a relatively obscure area of Roman history that I have had a lot of trouble learning more about.

 

The website could invite various academics to add to the list. They could either suggest their own books or other books they thought might be worthwhile. By adding to the unrv listing and maybe even adding a brief review of the book, they can piggy-back off of the website's highly targeted traffic flow. Heck, its really free advertising of the authors of the listed books. This really would be a win-win-win scenario. The authors could improve the sales of some lightly traded books and guys like myself and many of the members here could more easily answer our own questions if we had better access to the information. And the website will make out like a champ because this feature could easily become an additional attraction that draws people here.

 

Let me know what you guys think.

[Viggen]

i think it is a brilliant idea!

 

However it means lot of work hehe,

 

I would suggest that first of all we need categories, without categories no sorting, so if you have time DanM then i would suggest to propose mayebe 3 or 4 main categories with each another 3 or 4 sub categories, (i think that should be enough for now?) once we have that we can start filling them with books...

 

regards

viggen

[DanM]

i think it is a brilliant idea!

 

However it means lot of work hehe,

 

I would suggest that first of all we need categories, without categories no sorting, so if you have time DanM then i would suggest to propose mayebe 3 or 4 main categories with each another 3 or 4 sub categories, (i think that should be enough for now?) once we have that we can start filling them with books...

 

regards

viggen

 

No problem. First, I would suggest a 2-tiered approach to categorization. The first would be period of time and the second would be a specific field of interest.

 

For time I would do the following:

 

Early Republic (from the beginning until the addition of Sicily)

Late Republic (From the addition of Sicily until just before the reign of Augustus)

Principate (obviously starts with Augustus and I suggest it would go to immediately preceding Diocletian)

Later Empire (I would go with Diocletian to Justinian)

Byzantine Empire (anything after the reign of Justinian)

 

You might have a different preference in terms of breaking out the periods. This is just my suggestion.

 

Of course there would be a need to allow for books that span multiple periods. So if your database is a flat file you will either need multiple fields or you will need additional values for each record to denote more than one of hte categories I have listed above.

 

As for the categorization by area of interest, here is what I suggest:

 

Military (most people's favorite subject here)

Economic (would include everything from taxation to agriculture to trade and industry)

Religous

Archeaological

Rome's neighbors (not all were barbarians as the Persians, Carthaginians and Hellenistic Kingdoms prove)

And maybe a general category for things that do not fit neatly into another category.

 

I would also suggest the ability to look up by author.

 

If you want to think of this in terms of a flat file database, here is how I would see it.

 

Book Title Author Publisher Historical Period Subject

 

This sort of layout would easily allow people to seach by different criteria in a manner similar to the seach engines on a bookstore website.

 

Once you have typed in your seach criteria, the database would list books that fit your preference. Then you could click on the selection to read a brief synopsis. Maybe you could even have a section where members could give brief reviews of the book. I would suggest a limit on the number of words for reviewers so the page would not become too cluttered. Also, you might want to have links to pages on Amazon or Alibris or other e-commerce sites that would actually sell the book. For example, the author I mentioned above has 4 or 5 different books available on Amazon. He may have additional ones on Alibris or some other website. I think it would be a nice additional step if, within the page with the synosis, I could click on a link to the specific page at amazon or alibris that lists this book.

Edited November 28, 2005 by DanM

[DanM]

This could be a great way to entice professors/authors to visit the website to drum up interest in the books they have written or maybe some of the books that were meaningful to them. They could write the synopsis for their books, do Q&A sessions with the members to drum up interest, provide links to their blogs or websites or maybe do some other things I'm not even thinking about right now. For the purposes of Q&A sessions, I would envision something of an event calendar so members would know in advance when a professor would be available. If a professor thought it was worth his time, he could even visit the site periodically to raise the profile of his published work.

 

I don't know about you, but I think such an addition would be a nice break from yet another discussion about how history resembles a video game and/or movie.

 

Of course if the authors are not available, we could do the work ourselves.

 

If it would be helpful, I would personally volunteer to pull together the information for the following books to start things rolling:

 

The 3 volume set on Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

The Normans in Sicily by John Julius Norwich

The decline of the ancient world by AHM Jones

The Later Roman Empire by AHM Jones (2 volumes)

Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces by AHM Jones

The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian by AHM Jones

A History of Rome Through the Fifith Century by AHM Jones

A History of Etheopia by AHM Jones

The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman

The Berbers by Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress

From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple (he is an extremely cool guy who introduced me to authors such as Runciman and AHM Jones. He has his own website and actually responds to e-mails)

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown

Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire by Peter Brown

Hannibal by Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Scippio Africanus (Greater than Napoleon) by Liddell Hart

Great Cities of the Ancient World by L. Sprague de Camp

Black Sea by Neal Ascherson

The Arabs in History by Bernard Lewis

The Ancient Economy by Walter Scheidel & Sitta Von Reden

Hannibal's War by J.F. Lazenby

The First Punic War by J.F. Lazenby

The Hellenistic World by F.W. Walbank

History of the Byzantine State by George Ostrogorsky

 

Hopefully I could do a lot more in the future. I have about 20 books on my list that I would like to read. Its just a matter of making the time.

 

I think you might also want to add a subject category for historically-based fiction.

 

And one last thing. Did you get my personal IM about how periodic climate changes may have possibly affected the economic and social patterns that led up to the fall of the western empire? I wish I knew were to go to test my theory on this subject. I am sure someone must have addressed it so I believe its just a matter of finding the work or works that discussed it.

Edited November 28, 2005 by DanM

[Viggen]

This could be a great way to entice professors/authors to visit the website to drum up interest in the books they have written or maybe some of the books that were meaningful to them. They could write the synopsis for their books, do Q&A sessions with the members to drum up interest, provide links to their blogs or websites or maybe do some other things I'm not even thinking about right now. For the purposes of Q&A sessions, I would envision something of an event calendar so members would know in advance when a professor would be available. If a professor thought it was worth his time, he could even visit the site periodically to raise the profile of his published work.

 

I don't know about you, but I think such an addition would be a nice break from yet another discussion about how history resembles a video game and/or movie.

 

Of course if the authors are not available, we could do the work ourselves.

 

If it would be helpful, I would personally volunteer to pull together the information for the following books to start things rolling:

 

The 3 volume set on Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

The Normans in Sicily by John Julius Norwich

The decline of the ancient world by AHM Jones

The Later Roman Empire by AHM Jones (2 volumes)

Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces by AHM Jones

The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian by AHM Jones

A History of Rome Through the Fifith Century by AHM Jones

A History of Etheopia by AHM Jones

The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman

The Berbers by Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress

From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple (he is an extremely cool guy who introduced me to authors such as Runciman and AHM Jones. He has his own website and actually responds to e-mails)

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown

Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire by Peter Brown

Hannibal by Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Scippio Africanus (Greater than Napoleon) by Liddell Hart

Great Cities of the Ancient World by L. Sprague de Camp

Black Sea by Neal Ascherson

The Arabs in History by Bernard Lewis

The Ancient Economy by Walter Scheidel & Sitta Von Reden

Hannibal's War by J.F. Lazenby

The First Punic War by J.F. Lazenby

The Hellenistic World by F.W. Walbank

History of the Byzantine State by George Ostrogorsky

 

Hopefully I could do a lot more in the future. I have about 20 books on my list that I would like to read. Its just a matter of making the time.

 

....one last thing here. I think you might also want to add a subject category for historically-based fiction.

 

Hey Viggen, did you get my personal IM about how periodic climate changes may have possibly affected the economic and social patterns that led up to the fall of the western empire?

 

Great stuff DanM,

 

lets not forget though, we have something similar already, (in a rather basic form and not with so many categories (and the search is not all that perfect yet) but functioning http://www.unrv.com/roman-books/index.php, so if we pepp up that section with more categories and a better search we could get this working pretty fast...

 

yeah i got your pm, however a bit too late for a reply to the prof..

 

cheers

viggen

[DanM]

I don't really know much about the mechanics of a website so I don't have much to add about modifying the format of the unrv books section. If you think you can do it, then it sounds cool to me. I just know the current format would be difficult to use if your database had hundreds of books.

 

If you could modify the unrv books section to fit the needs of members who wished to search among hundreds of books to quickly find the ones in their area of interest, then I think it would work. We just need to make the format a little more robust.

 

Too bad about the climate question being too late. If I would have had 3 questions (kinda like 3 wishes) I would have added the one about climate and also asked him if he knew how a non-academic could find copies of Dumbarton Oaks papers. Thats another thing that is driving me crazy. I read all of these books that reference really cool papers written by different authors through Dumbarton Oaks, but its nearly impossible to find any of these papers for sale on websites. And the staff at Dumbarton Oaks don't respond to my e-mails either. I kinda feel like they don't want me to have access to the information for some reason or another. Thats probably paranoid, but its how things feel sometimes.

Edited November 28, 2005 by DanM

[Viggen]

Yeah i know the current book section has its limitations...

 

Ultimately Moonlapse has the last say how we going to implement that, but keep on coming with ideas, we defenitely appreciate them...

 

cheers

viggen

[DanM]

No problem. If you guys decide to act on this suggestion, then please let me know if I can be of service in any way. I will be happy to gather information on the books I mentioned above or do anything else you guys would like me to do.

 

I do not always check this site on a regular basis so e-mail is probably the quickest way to contact me.

 

Best of luck,

 

Dan

Edited November 28, 2005 by DanM

[Primus Pilus]

I think this is a great idea as well. I've often thought that our books section lacked a certain topical search functionality. I agree with Viggen that if we revamp it a bit it could provide an easy solution to expand the 'library'.

[DanM]

I think this is a great idea as well. I've often thought that our books section lacked a certain topical search functionality. I agree with Viggen that if we revamp it a bit it could provide an easy solution to expand the 'library'.

 

I'm with you guys on this one. I just think the current setup is less than ideal for a large "library". If we had something with the functionality comparable to Amazon.com or Alibris, then it would be more than enough. Just the ability to lookup by subject or author.