Mellon-funded digitization of the Geneva cuneiform collection
We
are delighted to announce a successful digitization collaboration
between the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire of Geneva (MAH) and the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation-supported research project "Creating a Sustainable
Digital Cuneiform Library (CSDCL)."
Under the
general direction of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI -
Los Angeles/Berlin), CSDCL is dedicated to the digital capture,
persistent archiving and web dissemination of major cuneiform
collections in the US, Europe and the Middle East. The 950 cuneiform
artifacts of the MAH, originally collected by the noted Swiss
Assyrioliogist Alfred Boissier (1867-1945, PhD 1890 at Leipzig under F.
Delitzsch) and acquired by the Museum in 1938, represent a significant
archive of texts in a major Swiss collection. In communications dating
back to early 2008 between one of us (Englund)
and Antoine Cavigneaux of the University of Geneva, the capture of the
MAH cuneiform collection was discussed and a plan for this collaboration
presented by Cavigneaux to the Museum early in 2011. With the support
of Geneva graduate student Émilie Pagé-Perron, CDLI's catalogue
documenting the MAH collection, then numbering 391 entries of published
texts dating to the 3rd millennium BC as well as to the Old Assyrian
period, was supplemented with the full electronic catalogue of artifacts
supplied by the Museum. Once an agreement of cooperation was signed
between CDLI and MAH, CSDCL's Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science (Berlin) postdoctoral researcher Ludek Vacin arranged for two
capture missions to Geneva, that took place in July and November of
2011. Following fatcross-processing and cleansing in Los Angeles of the
raw images created by Vacin, these files have now been posted to the
CDLI website, and can be viewed at <http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/mah/mah_fr.html>.
Pagé-Perron and Emmert Clevenstine of the University of Geneva are
correcting the bibliographical and text content references in the MAH
catalogue, and the imaging of some few remaining texts by Ms.
Pagé-Perron will complete the formal capture of the originals.
MAH
enthusiastically joined this effort to make available its complete
cuneiform collection to the world-wide community of web researchers and
informal learners. This new web content will assist cuneiform
specialists in the collation of existing editions, including ca. 290 Ur
III records published by H. Sauren in MVN 2 (1974); 52 Old Assyrian
texts by P. Garelli in RA 59-60 (1965-1966); 20 Ur III letters by E.
Sollberger, TCS 1 (1966), as well as 8 ED IIIb accounts by the same
author in Genava 26 (1948); and 30 texts from various periods by W.
Deonna in Genava 17 (1939) (in JCS 5 [1951], Sollberger published
catalogue treatments of a large number of still unedited MAH tablets).
We believe that general access to images of all text artifacts
establishes the broadest possible foundation for integrative research on
MAH and related cuneiform inscriptions by the scholarly community, and
we are particularly keen to assist specialists in the preparation of
scholarly editions of the nearly 500 documents currently listed as
"unpublished unassigned" in our catalogue entries (<http://tinyurl.com/6ugtndn>).
We
are confident that our adherence in this collaboration to the
principles of open access expressed, for instance, in the "Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,"
promulgated by the German Max Planck Society (<http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/>),
best serves all in the Humanities, but particularly those in the fields
of dead language research so dependent on access to source materials
for their work. In opening to world-wide inspection cuneiform
collections such as that located in Geneva, we join other cultural
heritage and research institutions in CDLI's 'extended family' who
believe that humanists should make every effort to fulfill their
curatorial and scholarly responsibilities to permanently archive, and to
make available to the public all artifacts of shared world history that
are in their immediate, or indirect care.
For the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire:
Jean-Luc Chappaz, Conservateur, Musées d'art et d'histoire de la Ville de Genève
For the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative:
Robert K. Englund, Director, CDLI, and Professor of Assyriology, UCLA
Jürgen
Renn, Co-Director, CDLI, Executive Director, Max Planck Institute for
the History of Science, Berlin, and Professor, Humboldt University
