Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) updates

Late last week, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) added three new data sets:

From announcements circulated by CDLI:

Images of nearly all mathematical tablets kept at Jena are now available online through the CDLI database. The images were produced as part of the publication Tablettes mathématiques de la collection Hilprecht (C. Proust with the collaboration of M. Krebernik and J. Oelsner) = TMH 8 (2008), and were batch-processed to CDLI standard format by UCLA staff.

New images of mathematical tablets from Nippur kept at Istanbul have also been added to CDLI. Like the Jena files, the photographs of the Istanbul texts prepared for CD insertion in the publication Tablettes mathematiques de Nippur (C. Proust; 2007) were processed for web at UCLA...

Please see Proust, "Numerical and Metrological Graphemes: From Cuneiform to Transliteration," CDLJ 2009/1, for a description of plans to include, in the standard format of an alliance of online cuneiform projects led by CDLI and ePSD, transliterations of all cuneiform metrological and mathematical texts.

and

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, in partnership with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, is pleased to announce the addition of new digital content to its web offerings.

In March of this year, two UCLA staff members of the project (Brumfield and Heinle) scanned 148 San Jose tablets, and processed the tablet surface images according to CDLI's "fat-cross" standards to complement the SET (Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty) publication of Rosicrucian and other US tablet collections published in 1961 by Tom B. Jones and John W. Snyder in transliteration only; collations of the REM tablets in SET were subsequently published by M. Cooper in 1986 (ASJ 8, 309-344) and by J. Carnahan and K. Hillard in 1993 and 1994 (ASJ 15, 246-251; ASJ 16, 310). Bob Englund posted these images to web this week; the entire REM collection can be accessed here.

This digital imaging was supported by a National Leadership Grant for Libraries - Building Digital Resources from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and is part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-term preservation of texts inscribed on endangered cuneiform tablets, and to provide free global access to all available text artifact data in furtherance of cuneiform research.

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.

CDLI also produces a variety of other essential resources.

Three journals

• Cuneiform Digital Library Journal (CDLJ)
  
• Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin (CDLB)
  
• Cuneiform Digital Library Notes (CDLN)

Who's Who in Cuneiform Studies
List of standard abbreviations for Assyriology

and more.