The Antiquities Coalition Joins CLIR on Planning for Digital Library of the Middle East

Debora Trein | 07.29.2016

From our partners at The Antiquities Coalition:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources $149,500 to support exploratory research, community building, and technical prototyping for the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME).

Along with the horrific loss of life and human suffering in the region, the cultural heritage of many nations in the Middle East and North Africa is presently under severe threat from a combination of destruction, looting, illegal black market trafficking, and terrorism. Digital technology, specifically those technologies associated with the architecture, management, and sustainability of large-scale digital libraries, can help remediate this crisis.

The DLME would create a digitally based, internationally shared inventory of cultural artifacts that includes detailed descriptions and images, and confirms objects’ ownership and legal status. This information would help determine whether an item of cultural or historical significance offered for sale or being transferred was acquired illegally. Images and brief descriptions from the DLME could be made publicly available to encourage greater understanding of the region’s cultural legacy and respect for the importance of the cultural commonwealth, while helping to safeguard a fundamentally important expression of our humanity.

“The proposal has attracted the engagement and attention of a very fine array of scholars, IT specialists, diplomats, and administrators, which augurs well for its longer-term prospects,” said CLIR President Charles Henry. “The opportunity to collaborate with and learn from our colleagues in the region is compelling. They will establish the priorities of activity and guide these efforts.”

Henry will serve with Peter Herdrich, co-founder of The Antiquities Coalition, CLIR’s principal organizational partner, as principal investigator. Media and digital arts producer Neil Sieling will serve as lead research analyst, and Elizabeth Waraksa, program director for research and strategic initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries, will serve as consultant to the project.

“Our focus is on finding practical solutions in the effort to fight the scourge of looting, the illicit trade, and terrorist financing.” Herdrich said. “We all believe there’s tremendous potential for the DLME to develop an implementable program that will significantly protect our shared cultural heritage. And that’s what we’ll be assessing.”

Over the next eight months, the team will conduct a series of focused research projects; meetings, webinars, and other methods of education and outreach; identify and convene an advisory council; and travel to the Middle East and North Africa to explore potential partners and projects that may fall within the purview of the DLME. Information and insight gathered through these means will frame a final report that will either corroborate the efficacy and cost effectiveness of creating a DLME, or articulate why the concept is not currently feasible.

Throughout the project, the team will have opportunities to draw on the energy and expertise of CLIR’s Digital Library Federation community. “We can bring the considerable technical expertise of the international digital library community to bear on this crisis,” said DLF director Bethany Nowviskie, “but we must also apply our increasingly mature social and ethical consciousness to work in partnership.”

If feasible, development of the DLME would likely proceed in stages that include converting free standing analog/paperbased existing inventories to searchable, digital databases; new digitization of objects in the Middle East and the creation of linked metadata for them; and the aggregation of existing digital assets relevant to the regional legacy held in U.S. and European institutions.

More information about the project is available at: https://www.clir.org/initiativespartnerships/DLME. 

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. Learn more at https://www.clir.org/.

The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a robust and diverse community of practice, advancing research, learning, and the public good through digital library technologies. DLF connects its parent organization, CLIR, to an active practitioner network, consisting of 151 member institutions, including colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, labs, agencies, and consortia. DLF is the institutional home to the National Digital Stewardship Alliance , which works to establish, maintain, and advance the capacity to preserve our nation’s digital resources for the benefit of present and future generations. Learn more at https://www.diglib.org 

The Antiquities Coalition is leading the global fight against cultural racketeering: the illicit trade in antiquities by organized criminals and terrorist organizations. This plunder for profit funds crime and conflict around the world—erasing our past and threatening our future. The Coalition’s innovative and practical solutions tackle crimes against heritage head on, empowering communities and countries in crisis. Learn more at www.theantiquitiescoalition.org

PDF of article here

A Digital Library for the Middle East

By Charles Henry 

Last October at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) annual Forum in Vancouver, Canada, I served on the final plenary panel, asked to speak about themes and topics of that Forum that struck me as especially compelling. I reported that the emphasis throughout the conference on the correlation of the social implications and potential societal benefits (as well as potential disruption) of the technologies associated with building and evolving digital libraries was invigorating. The Forum had become far more than a technology venue focused on sharing insights into code, platforms, and apps, and while continuing to focus on those critical issues the speakers were thoughtfully and rigorously exploring ways that digital libraries can improve our capacity for better understanding the world and our roles in it. We should, in brief, always acknowledge that our digital libraries can virtually encompass our aspirations, biases, and yearnings, and can thus have enormous influence on our cultures, educational programs, politics, and behavior. I concluded by noting a project under development within CLIR and DLF called the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME), which had several strategic goals, including the construction of inventories and digital surrogates of endangered cultural artifacts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), methods to share that information to help mitigate smuggling, and over time engage students and scholars with its open and accessible aggregation of thousands of years of human expression. The DLME seemed to me exemplary of the responsibilities and constructive social value of these technologies promoted by the Forum’s participants.

This week we gratefully acknowledge funding of the planning phase for the Digital Library of the Middle East by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The expected outcomes of this initial stage of activity include: a rigorous assessment of the technical specifications to build out the DLME; a more sophisticated understanding of the costs of the DLME; a registry of existing domestic and international related digital resources, assets, and projects relevant to a digital library of aggregated resources; identifying partnering institutions and individuals, with an emphasis on universities, museums, and archeological expeditions within the Middle East; as well as a more sophisticated knowledge of the cultural, political, and technical challenges of working in the region as foundational to a successful, sustained cross-cultural collaboration. In developing the proposal for this project, it has been most gratifying to see the swift and generous level of engagement of many R1 universities and libraries and liberal arts colleges; museums both domestic and in Europe and the Middle East; the interest of prominent scholars of and in the MENA region; and support from the Middle East diplomatic corps. The Antiquities Coalition is a full partner in this venture, with contributions from the Digital Public Library of America, National Digital Stewardship Alliance, and other sophisticated technical enterprises eagerly anticipated.

It is important to be explicit about the origin of this project: unlike other ventures CLIR and DLF have supported, the impetus for the DLME is the unimaginable human suffering, loss of life and home, and destruction that has riven the Middle East and continues to exact a horrific toll in lives destroyed and displaced. The Digital Library of the Middle East was conceived as a project because building digital libraries it what we do very well. As I noted in a previous blog, our academic constituencies do not wear blue helmets, we do not bear arms, and we have no recourse to judiciary remediation, so in effect we try to contribute within our range of expertise, informed by our compassion and purpose.

This project is also conceived not as a Western implantation, but as a means to better connect with, understand, and be guided by those who are immediately affected by this carnage. The DLME will be a project of the Middle East—its scholars, curators, librarians, political leaders, and students will set priorities and direct the execution of the digitization and the knowledge organization that will make this experiment coherent. Local training for job creation and the long-term conduct of the DLME is integral to the project; we also envision an international curriculum for other regions of the world similarly afflicted or threatened.

 PDF of article here

The Future of the Past: From Amphipolis to Mosul, New Approaches to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Eastern Mediterranean

July 6, 2016

The AIA Site Preservation Program is excited to present the newest publication in its Heritage, Conservation, and Archaeology series.

Edited by Konstantinos Chalikias, Maggie Beeler, Ariel Pearce, and Steve Renette

The volume presents the proceedings of the conference “The Future of the Past” held at the UPenn Museum on April 10th and 11th, 2015.

Read The Future of the Past 

List of Chapters

The Future of the Past: From Amphipolis to Mosul, New Approaches to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Eastern Mediterranean

Konstantinos Chalikias, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Maggie Beeler, Bryn Mawr College, Ariel Pearce, Temple University, and Steve Renette, University of Pennsylvania

Go, Do Good! Responsibility and the Future of Cultural Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 21st Century

Morag M. Kersel, DePaul University

Contested Antiquities, Contested Histories: The City of David as an Example

Rannfrid I. Thelle, Wichita State University

Cultural Racketeering in Egypt—Predicting Patterns in Illicit Activity: Quantitative Tools of the 21st-Century Archaeologist

Katie A. Paul, The Antiquities Coalition

Beyond the Destruction: Cultural Diplomacy on the Island of Cyprus

Leah Marangos, State University of New Jersey at Rutgers

The Materiality of Post-War(s): The Impact of Conflict on the Archaeology and Landscape of Iraqi Kurdistan

Kyra Kaercher, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The Reincarnation of the Damned Qajar Palace: From Palace to Prison, from Prison to Museum

Zohreh Soltani, State University of New York at Binghamton

Dealing with Legacy Data: Lessons from the Ur of the Chaldee’s Project

Simon Denham, The British Museum, and Sasha Renninger, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Ancient Near Eastern Material Culture Studies and Reflectance Transformation Imaging

Ashley Fiutko Arico, Johns Hopkins University, Nathaniel E. Greene, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Heather Dana Davis Parker, Johns Hopkins University

The Power of the Future: Re-Analyzing the House of the Rhyta at Pseira 

Miriam G. Clinton, Rhodes College

Visualizing Structural Issues Through Photogrammetric 3D Documentation of Cultural Heritage: The Venetian Sea-Fortress at Herakleion, Crete, Greece

Gianluca Cantoro, Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS-FORTH), Vassiliki Sythiakakis, Ephorate of Antiquities of Herakleion—Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and Stelios Manolioudis, Independent geologist