Columbia University Libraries cuneiform collection in CDLI
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The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI <http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/>), in partnership with the Rare Book andManuscript Library of the Columbia University Libraries in New York(CUL, <http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/rbml.html>), is pleased toannounce the addition of new digital content to its web offerings.
The collection of 629 cuneiform texts of the Columbia UniversityLibraries is one of the oldest in North America and is made up of anunusual mixture of genres of materials ranging in date from theProto-Elamite period to Hellenistic times. The Ur III texts in thecollections have been the subject of several scholarly publicationsdating from as early as 1896 (William R. Arnold, Ancient-BabylonianTemple Records in the Columbia University Library), and were mostrecently gathered together in a comprehensive 2010 monograph by StevenGarfinkle, Herbert Sauren, and Marc Van De Mieroop (=CUSAS 16). Butbeyond the tablets from the Ur III period, the CUL collection remainsrelatively unstudied.
Following the 2010 publication, CDLI staff contacted Jane Siegel, RareBook Librarian of the CUL, and with her kind assistance and that ofthe CU library staff, UCLA graduate student Jared Wolfe was, in Juneof last year, able to flatbed scan all then accessible artifacts. Theraw images of that campaign were subsequently processed to CDLIfatcrosses by UCLA staff, and have been posted to web, accessible boththrough CDLI's search page<http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search/indexi.php> as well asthrough a special website dedicated to the collection at<http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/columbia/columbia.html>, with abrief introduction written by M. Van De Mieroop at<http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/columbi/columbia_intro.html>. Wewelcomecorrections and additions to our text identifications, and areparticularly desirous to learn of specialist interest in the scholarlyedition of texts listed as unpublished. The now available image
documentation, itself reduced for web dissemination from archival600ppi tif to 300ppi jpg files, is envisioned as a facilitator in thepreparation of annotated manuscripts.
The imaging and image processing in this Columbia-CDLI collaborationwere made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,and are part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-termdigital preservation of ancient inscriptions on cuneiform tablets,and, in furtherance of cuneiform research, to provide persistent, freeglobal access to all available text artifact data.
For the CDLI and the CUL:
Jane Siegel, Rare Book Librarian, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University
Marc Van De Mieroop, Professor of Ancient History, Columbia University
Robert K. Englund, Director, CDLI
