Using DYABOLA (archaeological bibliography)

What is DYABOLA?

DYABOLA is probably the single most important bibliographic database for classical archaeology. It indexes every publication that has come in to the German Archaeological Institute in Rome from 1956 to present. One particularly valuable feature is that every publication is indexed by site and region: this is far and away the best single source for finding out what has been published about a particular site or region in the past 45 years.

Access to DYABOLA

DYABOLA is available on the WWW to subscribers with a password. Since Holy Cross has a license to use DYABOLA, any Holy Cross student or faculty member can get the password and use DYABOLA from anywhere on the internet. You can get the password from the Dinand Library reference desk, or from your archaeology instructor, or email Neel Smith.

Starting DYABOLA

• At the DYABOLA main page, click on the "Start" button, and enter the Holy Cross password key.
• At the "List of databases", select "Realkatalog DAI Rom" (the default) and choose your preferred language, unless you want to use the default of German.
• By default, the database opens to a "Quick Search" menu. This is rarely what you will want, since it requires you to know some bibliographic information already. Usually, a more useful starting point will be the "Subject Tree": click on the button labelled "Subject Tree" from the left-hand frame of the window.

Searching for bibliography

One of the most valuable things about DYABOLA is that it allows you to find bibliography on a specific site or region. Here's how:

Finding bibliography for a site

1. Make sure that you have started DYABOLA, and are beginning from the "Subject Tree" as described above.
2. In the main window, find the entry for "topography" and expand it by clicking the plus sign next to it.
3. Expand the entry for "countries, regions, sites"
4. Scroll down to the country/region of your choice. (If you are viewing these in English, be aware that they are alphabetized by their German spelling, so e.g. "Czechoslovakia" follows "Thrace" since "Tschechei und Slowakei" follow "Thrake" in German). If there are no further subdivisions, as with "Thrace", the link on the country name will take you directly to a list of bibliography for that area. Otherwise, expand the entry for the country/region of your choice.
5. Sites and regions are spelled according to the German form of their name. You may either enter part of the name, or click on the large blue triangle to see a scrollable list of all the site or region names for your chosen area. Use the blue triangles to scroll up or down the list if necessary, and click on your site name to see bibliography.