Project "Creating a Sustainable Cuneiform Digital Library" funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

A broad collaboration of Assyriologists, cultural heritage officials and information technology experts are pleased to announce their successful proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding of a two-year project dedicated to the digital capture, persistent archiving and web dissemination of major cuneiform collections in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Work on this initiative will commence early in 2009. Paraphrasing from the project abstract:

The project "Creating a Sustainable Cuneiform Digital Library" proposes to develop and implement methods of collection capture and internet applications designed to foster a new form of collaboration among academic researchers and curatorial staffs of European, American, and Middle Eastern cultural institutions. In this first phase of the initiative, efforts will focus on the development of standardized, innovative methods in the electronic capture and permanent data archiving of sometimes fragile or vulnerable cuneiform collections across a broad array of public institutions. By combining XML text description with a variety of high-resolution raster and scalable vector graphic images, the overall goal is to create a flexible and interactive access system containing tools for a networked presentation of early writing for both individual text collections and virtually reconstituted ancient archives that are now spread across the globe. Collections will be stored in central servers of the University of California, the University of Pennsylvania and the German Max Planck Society, as well of course as locally in each museum concerned.

This project is intended to provide a blueprint for a substantive advance in how Humanities and IT researchers, and cultural heritage officials, can combine their efforts to more effectively contribute to our understanding of human history. It will maximize the educational potential of networked virtual museums to share the historical significance of restricted artifacts with a worldwide audience. By creating a unified access to a highly representative corpus of early writing and using computing technology to facilitate its semantic interpretation, the project will foster an unprecedented scholarly cooperation between researchers and cultural institutions. At the same time, "lines of communication" to the heritage of pre-scientific civilizations dead many millennia will be opened to a networked public. As a result, we believe that modern culture achieves a deeper appreciation and understanding of its own roots.

The partners involved in this project, now nearly two years in development, include major advocates of the principles of open access to all artifacts of human history, and of federated research in the field of cuneiform studies. We are firmly committed to using this opportunity to advance scholarly access to, and digital preservation of the cultural heritage of the ancient Near East, and are grateful to count among our numerous collection partners the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Penn Museum, the British Museum, and the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria.

Principal Investigator:

Robert K. Englund, Professor of Assyriology, UCLA, Director, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, Los Angeles

Co-Principal Investigator s:

Stephen J. Tinney, Clark Research Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Director, Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, Philadelphia

John Curtis, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East, British Museum, London

Jürgen Renn, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Professor, Humboldt University, Berlin