CDLI announces online presentation of the Institut Catholique collection, new features of its website

The CDLI is pleased to announce the online presentation of the tablet collection of the Institut Catholique, Paris, in its "Digital Library" pages (http://cdli.ucla.edu/index.html). From the collection homepage at http://cdli.ucla.edu/links/icp_en.html:

Within the framework of an agreement of cooperation signed by the Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP) and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) on May 22, 2002, Bertrand Lafont, Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris), and Jacob Dahl of the CDLI staff at the University of California at Los Angeles were given direct access to the full cuneiform collection of the ICP. With the support of ICP staff, Lafont and Dahl proceeded to scan the collection in June of 2002 following procedures discussed in the methods pages (http://cdli.ucla.edu/cdli_methods.html [dead link]) of the CDLI, and have since then completed cataloguing and transliteration collations of all texts.

The ICP presentation, documented in a CNRS press release today (attached), is the first of a series of planned cooperative efforts between the CDLI and the CNRS, supervised by Bertrand Lafont, to digitize and make generally accessible all French collections of early cuneiform. Introductory, and subsequent translation and commentary text for the tablet collections will be offered in English and French.

We further take the opportunity of this posting to direct the list members' attention to the format of transliterations inserted in the individual text pages (see for example http://cdli.ucla.edu/P134774 = TRU 10). These transliterations correspond to the coding proposals of the CDLI as presented in an earlier notice, further discussed by project associates at technical meetings in Berlin and Los Angeles in May and December of 2002, and available in their current form, as written by Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, at http://cdli.ucla.edu/methods/de/conventions.html. Catalogue date of origin entries represent "ruler.year.month.day", measurements are "height x width x thickness", in mm.

Finally, we present at our homepage (http://cdli.ucla.edu/index.html) a link to a new feature of the CDLI. The Arboreal XML browser is a powerful tool developed by the Archimedes Project at Harvard (http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/) for content-based access to, and annotation of XML texts. http://cdli.ucla.edu/progress/arboreal.html links to a Java applet for use with the transliterations of the archaic "Erlenmeyer collection" (this software was implemented for us by Malcolm Hyman, Harvard, at our December 2002 meeting at UCLA (http://cdli.ucla.edu/comm/reports/la200212.html)). We expect in the near future to expand this implementation to include its applicability to all texts of the CDLI.

CDLI
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
Los Angeles/Berlin
9 January 2003