Charles E. Jones, the Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities in the University Libraries at Penn State, has received the 2015 Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology Award from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). He was honored at an award ceremony during the organization’s annual meeting in early January in New Orleans.

Since its inception in 2009, The Ancient World Online (AWOL), a project by Jones, has offered open access material related to the ancient world, serving archaeological information to more than 1.1 million visitors. The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but it also includes other kinds of networked information as it is available. It regularly lists emerging and existing born digital projects, and it publicizes repositories of digitized scholarship relating to antiquity with a cumulative content of thousands of volumes.

Jones explains, “The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique/early Islamic period.”

AIA is North America’s oldest and largest organization devoted to the world of archaeology. Founded in 1879 and chartered by the United States Congress in 1906, it has nearly 210,000 members and 100 local societies in the United States, Canada and overseas. “Penn State is honored that one of our Libraries faculty members has received this noteworthy award for his scholarship in the digital humanities,” notes Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications at Penn State,