OPES – Oslo Papyri Electronic System

Search • About the collection • About the project • Acquisition • Highlights • Rights • Editions of unpublished papyri • Resources

About the project

At the end of 2000, steps were taken to initiate a digitalization project of the University of Oslo Library Papyrus Collection. The project was named OPES (Oslo Papyri Electronic System) and its aims are: 

1) to make all the published papyri from the collection (around 280 out of a total of 2272) available on the www by providing for each papyrus a high resolution digital image and information about its physical and paleographical features of and scholarly history; 

2) to catalogue and image the rest of the papyri, making the catalogue available on the web and keeping the images in a separate database that users may access on demand. 

Due to the international character of papyrological study and research, English was chosen as the language of the project. In its first phases the project benefited greatly from the collaboration with the APIS project, whose the late director, Prof. Traianos Gagos, generously allowed us to use the Michigan FileMaker Pro template for cataloguing and registration of data. This collaboration has now evolved in the partnership with the international database papyri.info where the documentary and, following the creation of the DCLP also the literary, papyri can be browsed and searched together with those of the other papyrus collections.

Between 2015 and 2020 pictures were taken of all the published and unpublished papyri in the collection and a set of diapositives taken in the 70's has also been digitized, togethere with the the collection´s inventory list made by the late professor Leiv Amundsen. This material will be gradually made available through the OPES website. In the autumn 2021 the historical archive of the collection was digitized and will be made available through the OPES database.

The Team

Federico Aurora: Subject specialist in Classics, curator of the Papyrus collection of the University of Oslo Library

Andrea Gasparini: Chief engineer at Digital services at University of Oslo Library

Gunn Haaland: Classicist and librarian, curator emerita

Anastasia Maravela: Papyrologist, Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Oslo

Giuliano Sidro: Erasmus+ trainee (1/3/2016-31/5/2016)

Lucía Sánchez Mendoza: Erasmus+ trainee (23/8/2021-25/10/2021)

Current project assistant: David Grimaldi, MA student in Ancient Greek

Technical solutions

Scanning was initially carried out using a Scando digital scanner from Kaiser. In the last phase of the project a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV digital camera was used.

Until February 2020, the database was kept in FileMaker Pro, using the bundled web-server to present the collection on the web. In February 2020, the database was migrated to PostgresSQL and made available on the web using the homegrown UB-baser system.

Registration and catalog

All registration is done on the basis of the Michigan FM Pro template, which makes room for all the normal cataloguing data necessary for the retrieval of a document: author, title, origin, date, subject headings. We also give a physical description of the document, provide a translation and register personal and geographical names mentioned, as well as information of publication and bibliographical references concerning each item. The data are as far as possible in keeping with standards set by the APIS project.