The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
June 26th, 2006
It took 12 years to produce (1988-2000) and cost 4.5 million dollars (according to its editor Richard Talbert). It has a whole page dedicated to listing donors and supporters of the project. It recruited seventy-three compilers, with ten regional editors with ninety-five reviewers and twenty-two cartographers. It is 148 pp. long and with companion gazetteer comes in at $350.00 (if you take the gazetteer on paper — 1,383 pp. — it comes down to $150.00).
This implies a unit price to fixed cost ratio of 1 to 10,000 which is likely to be the rough number of copies they expect to sell. Given the knowledge stored up in this work and that it seems to have been funded up-front to a large extent this seems a very inefficient way to disseminate it. I can’t help wondering what would happen if they made a digital version of this work open, free for anyone to use and reuse.
Related posts:
- Opening Up Ancient Geodata: The Barrington Atlas II I’ve written previously about the
- Greek Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) We’ve just added a Greek translati
- World Bank Opens Up Development Data Today, the World Bank announced that i
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January 22nd, 2007 at 11:25 am
[...] I’ve written previously about the Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World which took 12 years to produce (1988-2000). It’s a wonderful example of interdisciplinary collaboration using, as it did, the talents of a multitude of classical scholars as well as many cartographers. In that earlier post I pointed out that, unfortunately, none of the underlying geodata available (only the images) but that it had a fairly hefty price tag — even though much of the work was ‘up-front’ funded and digital distribution would be practically zero-cost. [...]