Background. During 2006/2007 Columbia University Libraries initiated a research and development project with the working title of "Papyrological Navigator" (PN). This effort was funded in part by Mellon funds allocated by Prof. Roger Bagnall from his 2003 Distinguished Achievement Award, in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (APIS 5 grant), and in part by Columbia University Libraries. The goal of this effort was to demonstrate proof of concept that a system can be designed to provide an integrated display of a variety of scholarly data sources relevant to the study of ancient texts.
In 2008, a prototype PN was developed at Columbia. The responsibility for implementing the PN moved to New York University in 2009, following Prof. Bagnall's appointment as Director of the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and the project joined forces with the Mellon-funded Integrating Digital Papyrology (IDP) project. The current version of the PN represents a complete redesign of the original, using Open Source tools including Apache Solr and the Mulgara RDF triple store. For more detail, please see the IDP project wiki.
Sample displays. The following links provide direct access to sample Navigator records that include transcriptions, translations and enhanced images, as well as cataloging.