Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Open Access Travel Literature

 [First posted in April 2009; most recently updated 25 Augutst 2020]

The history of travel, travelers, and travel writing is an academic discipline in it's own right. Travelers accounts of journeys from before Pausanius to the present form an important corpus of descriptive documentation of ancient monuments and sites, many of them no longer visible. ASTENE: The Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East organizes conferences and publishes the Bulletin of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE) devoted to the topic.  The venerable Hakluyt Society has been the focus of publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material since 1846. Shirley Weber's compendious bibliography Voyages and travels in Greece, the Near East, and adjacent regions, made previous to the year 1801; being a part of a larger catalogue of works on geography, cartography, voyages and travels, in the Gennadius Library in Athens has been available online for some time (though it has been brought to my attention that it in no longer open access).

The discipline seems to be an attractive one for the development of open access digital libraries. 
I encourage readers here to let me know by means of the comments or otherwise, of other useful open access collections.

1 comment:

  1. You might find some of the type of travel books you mention at Project Gutenberg, filed under Travel. For some reason they put Women's Travel in a separate category.
    Thanks for some good suggestions. I am going to link to this site in a post at A Traveler's Library. http://atravelerslibrary.com

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