July 26, 2001. Nashville, TN. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given $100,000 grant to Vanderbilt University to create ETANA, (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives). ETANA is a cooperative project supported by the American Oriental Society, the American Schools of Oriental Research, Case Western Reserve University Library, the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University, the Institute of Archaeology (Tel Aviv University), the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the Society of Biblical Literature, Vanderbilt University Press and the Vanderbilt Divinity Library.
This grant is the second received by ETANA from The Mellon Foundation: in 2000, The Mellon Foundation funded a planning grant that enabled representatives of participating organizations to meet and explore the feasibility of this project. These organizations collectively represent over 7,000 scholars world wide who are interested in the academic study of the ancient Near East (ANE).
This new funding will allow ETANA to migrate Abzu, the premier Internet ANE portal developed by the Oriental Institute, to a more robust database structure and make it part of the developing ETANA comprehensive portal for ANE studies. The grant will also allow ETANA participants to experiment with the digitization of up to 100 core texts important to scholars of the ancient Near East. Published materials in this discipline can be especially difficult to digitize because of their ancient language content.
Longer term, it is anticipated that ETANA will contain a substantial number of core texts, excavation site data, member society journals, excavation reports, and a scholar's commons to help researchers in ancient Near Eastern studies communicate with one another.
Charles Jones, editor and creator of Abzu at the Oriental Institute, said, "The Oriental Institute, its Research Archives and Abzu project is pleased to be a partner in ETANA. The consortial nature of this endeavor is of critical importance, and The Mellon Foundation's generous funding of the project will solidify and expand that partnership towards the enhancement of communication and further access to information on the world of the ancient Near East."
Jack M. Sasson, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Vanderbilt's Divinity School, commented, "The promise of ETANA is enormous. Even in its formative stage under the new Mellon Foundation grant, the advantage of reshaping Abzu to deliver many more features to a broad clientele is exciting enough. Many will also wish well the experiment to make core texts available in a digitized form and will welcome the possibility of facilitating the delivery of online journal articles. The prospect of creating a uniform program by which to enter and readily deliver field data entries may yet be the most rewarding of future plans, for if it can be adapted to study of documents (new and old), it will prove a boon to scholarship that cannot be overestimated."
For more information about ETANA see:
www.etana.org
For questions contact, Paul Gherman, University Librarian, Vanderbilt University, gherman@library.vanderbilt. edu