The Walters Art Museum and Creative Commons
From AWOL: The Walters Art Museum announced this week that it has removed copyright restrictions from more than 10,000 Images. Those images are now licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Collections at the Walters relating to antiquity include: Art of the Ancient Americas Art of Ancient Egypt and Nubia Art of Ancient Greece […] Read MoreFARLI Ancient Pottery Database
The Foundation for Archaeological Research in the Land of Israel (FARLI) “announce[d] the launch of its newest Project: The FARLI Ancient Pottery Database. In the spirit of FARLI’s goals to promote the archaeological research of the land of Israel and the southern Levant, and to develop new technological tools in the service of archaeology, … […] Read MoreBibliotheca Alexandrina’s Digital Library of Calligraphies and Inscriptions
From AWOL comes the announcement of a new project of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The latter is a modern twist on the famous ancient Hellenistic library of Alexandria, the one that supposedly went up in flames when Julius Caesar paid Egypt a visit, destroying what was reputed to be the largest and best research library in […] Read MoreAncient World Image Bank
The ever-productive people at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU) are continuing to add on to their Ancient World Image Bank. So far the collection contains photos from archaeological sites in Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, Greece and Italy. They chose to use Flickr instead of setting up their own database system. Maybe […] Read MorePapyri.info
I’m always interested in how online databases of all types of cultural heritage are structured. What is their interface, how does the search function work, how user-friendly is the browsing experience, is it easy for scholars to contribute, etc.? Another fine example has come to my attention: Papyri.info, an initiative of New York University. … […] Read MoreArchaeobotanical Database in Tübingen
Scholars at the University of Tübingen in Germany are “investigat[ing] the development of prehistoric wild plant floras of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The geographic area … represented in the data, includes Greece, Turkey, Western Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Northern Egypt. The chronological frame comprises the Chalcolithic period, Bronze and […] Read MoreOIDOO
“Oidoo”? It sounds a bit like something Scooby-Doo would say… Just kidding. It actually is an acronym that stands for Oriental Institute Demotic Ostraca Online. Held in the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum, it is “a large collection of nearly 900 Demotic ostraca, pottery sherds upon which ancient scribes recorded a wide variety of […] Read MoreDigitising Cultural Heritage at the BM
A study day at the British Museum Saturday 4 September, 09.55–16.30 Stevenson Lecture Theatre Free, booking advised As well as revolutionising modern work and social life, digital technology is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes it possible to do things that only 20 […] Read More