Italian Sigillata in US Libraries

Anyone looking for an introduction to current thinking about Italian Sigillata could do worse than consulting the following four books:

• Ettlinger, E. (1990). Conspectus formarum terrae sigillatae Italico modo confectae


• Marabini Moevs, M. T. (2006). Cosa : the Italian sigillata


• Oxé, A., H. Comfort and P. Kenrick. (2000). Corpus vasorum Arretinorum : a catalogue of the signatures, shapes and chronology of Italian sigillata


• Poblome, J. et al, eds. (2004). Early Italian sigillata : the chronological framework and trade patterns : proceedings of the First International ROCT-Congress, Leuven, May 7 and 8, 1999

Here's how one would do when looking for these titles at various libraries.

	Conspectus	Cosa	OCK	Poblome et al.
Berkeley	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf
Cincinnati	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf
Columbia	Offsite	Not held	On shelf	On shelf
Harvard	On shelf	On shelf	Off site	"no online circulation information"
Michigan	Not held	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf

Two notes:
1: I chose the libraries somewhat arbitrarily. I use the Columbia library. Harvard is the largest university library system in the US. Cincinnati, Michigan and Berkeley all have strong graduate programs in Classical Archaeology.

2: The table obscures some detail. In particular, only the Burnham Classical Library at Cincinnati houses all these volumes in a single building. The other library systems distribute them between a main library, an art history library, and/or off-site storage.

Despite the fact that moving a volume "off site" is a terrible thing to do, this post isn't really a complaint. In fact, the table suggests that one's ability to study Italian Sigillata isn't half-bad if you live within convenient distance of a major research library. And there's always ILL.

Regular readers of this blog can probably guess that I'm itching to launch into a diatribe about how archaeologists would be better served if all this information were online. Take that as a subtext. For now, I'll just mention that Google Books lists "No preview available" for all these titles. That is a bummer.