Project Description

ETANA is envisioned to include the permanent archiving, dissemination and generation of both front- and back-end stages of scholarly knowledge (such as archaeological excavation reports, editions of ancient and modern texts, core early monographs, dictionaries, journals, and reports in the public domain), a portal to ANE Web resources, an electronic commons where scholars in the field can share data and images, and eventually an electronic publishing effort for "born digital" publications. ETANA will also collect and/or develop software required for the production of the Internet site in core areas identified by the planning committees and outlined herewith. Vanderbilt's library will serve as the host technical site and grant administrator.

The first-year grant funding will allow for starting development in two of these areas: the conversion of ABZU to a database-generated Web portal for ANE, and experimental efforts with digitization methods for early core texts. Further planning and discussion for identifying standards and data structures for the Data Archive and Repository and the "Archaeologist's Tool Kit" will also continue during this first year.

I. ABZU

ABZU, hosted by the library of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, is the current portal of choice for those working in studies of the ancient Near East. Participants in ETANA will work to develop a seamless whole between the ABZU portal and the ETANA content site. A more powerful database and server architecture will be developed and installed to make ABZU more robust and easier to maintain.

The current ABZU site consists of a matrix of static Web pages. The site is rich in content, but unwieldy to maintain. A goal of ETANA is to extract all the content from these Web pages to populate a database of resources relevant to the field of ANE. A Web interface will be created for this database to provide scholars easy access to these resources through a variety of browse and search options. Another Web interface will be developed to allow scholars in the field to add new content to the ABZU database. This interface would also include features that allow an authorized editor to review submissions before they become part of the active database.

II. Early Core Text Digital Conversion

In a discipline that is both archaeological and text based, attention to previously published texts in the discipline is appropriate. In ancient Near Eastern studies, many of the earliest publications still have significant value for scholarly research. Unfortunately, most of these publications are held by only a handful of libraries, severely limiting their use for research and teaching. In planning discussions, ANE scholars determined that digital access to these volumes would be of significant benefit.

In the judgment of these participants, the ability to view the publications online was more significant than the ability to search them by full-text keyword. Many of the texts discussed contain substantial information not contained in the Roman character set and would be unlikely to benefit from attempts to do optical character recognition (OCR) on the content. Because of the desire to maximize the number of publications available for viewing online, the scholars recommended omitting the expensive process of converting the texts to searchable ASCII text (through double keying or OCR conversion).

Delivering the digitized images in a widely accessible display format (such as Adobe's PDF) with access enhanced via markup points emulating (or exceeding) the access points in the printed edition, will be one of the methods explored in the Early Core Texts project. The result will be that a scholar or student anywhere in the world will be able to access a substantial body of significant ANE resources that never before were as readily available or perhaps even available together at any single institution. Thus, benefits to scholarship and pedagogy are anticipated through new approaches to text research.

ETANA will contract for the scanning of a large number of selected pre-1925 publications (titles in the public domain) in a high-resolution format currently accepted as a standard for "digital preservation." Hosted on the ETANA site at Vanderbilt, these high-resolution images will be stored for the long term, held for a future day in which full-text conversion may become less expensive. In addition, the images will contain appropriate structural, administrative, and technical metadata to ensure their long-term use as preservation documents. Best-practice standards will be followed for quality control. High-resolution images in TIFF format of sufficient quality and resolution to preserve this content digitally will be created and stored on media that will be refreshed at appropriate intervals to ensure permanent accessibility. These high-resolution images will be converted to a standard format that can be easily read and retrieved over the Internet. PDF format is proposed because of its worldwide availability. Tables of contents will be linked for ease of navigation within the texts, as well as page-level links from terms in the originally published index.

III. The Data Archive and Repository and the "Archaeologist's Tool Kit" (ATK)

ETANA will create a repository and archive for archaeological data and select appropriate database environments that will interface with its software programs for posting field data and tools for data retrieval and analysis. The software programs will allow the repository to be searched and queried via the Web and will enable the reports to be disseminated in various electronic media, including the Internet.

As a departure point, ETANA will invite existing archaeological projects to share information and data that are ready to migrate to a standardized system. Case Western Reserve University will participate in this process by offering developments from its digital archive to ETANA as a pilot project. One of CWRU's pilot projects is an archaeological site, Tel Nimrin, whose electronic version, Virtual Nimrin (VN), will soon to be running on UNIX and Oracle. ETANA expects this project to be one of several that it will use to develop and test standards that will have wide acceptance among scholars in ANE and possibly to those engaged in the broader study of archaeology.

Archaeologists working throughout the Near East create field reports of excavations, some in hard copy that are eventually digitized. These become the basis for seasonal and final reports that often take years to be published at considerable expense that typically strains the project's very limited staff and financial resources.

Working with field archaeologists who direct projects in the Near East and elsewhere, ETANA will develop both standards and software programs for electronically capturing original data in the field. Such data include database and spreadsheet records, photos, drawings, videos, audio records, statistical programs, CAD, GIS, and GPS information, and other types of data that may be specific to individual projects. These ETANA software programs will also be designed to eliminate the need to re-code data, so that original field data can be migrated though the stages of research to dissemination. These programs will expedite processes and shorten the time between fieldwork and dissemination of archaeological results.

The infrastructure to support the ATK will be developed jointly by CWRU and Vanderbilt. The long-term objective of ETANA is for the ATK to become a powerful tool for collecting field data according to standards that make cross-site comparison possible. In addition, the ATK will create a searchable Internet database of archaeological data for the entire ANE field. ETANA will thus become the dissemination source not only for these projects, but also for others that may wish to participate in a portion of ETANA services. The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) is an example. Its digital electronic reports, produced under the auspices of and administered by its Committee on Archaeological Policy (CAP) and Committee on Publications (COP), might be disseminated through ETANA. ASOR's involvement will also be valuable tool in soliciting projects, establishing peer review panels, vetting proposals, and assuring that reports are accessible and disseminated to the scholarly community and the general public.

IV. The Scholar's Commons

Many fields are currently developing preprint archives that allow scholars to communicate rapidly with their peers by posting drafts or near-final copies to accessible, generally free servers. Submissions to these preprint archives are not reviewed, edited, or in any way monitored. It is felt that providing a preprint archive in ancient Near Eastern Studies is not desirable due to the nature of publication in this discipline.

Instead, there is an expressed need for a common space for ANE scholars to share and make accessible to their peers a wide variety of data, images, maps, texts, and other items as raw material for scholarship. ETANA's Scholar's Commons will provide such an electronic space.

V. "Born Digital" Electronic Publications

Because of the worldwide membership of the various organizations in ETANA, fostering digital publications will allow for rapid dissemination and access to ANE literature and data to all regions of the world. Merging the current print publications of these societies into a single searchable database will allow for greater comprehensive access, especially since high definition images and archaeological data will be included.

The developing infrastructure through which electronic editions archived by ETANA could also serve as the basis for print publication will benefit all of the partner institutions. This infrastructure will provide typeset quality, page image printing at a cost which is at least as economical as the current print run technology. The ETANA archive could provide both a "dark archive" of print-ready editions for "one off" sale by association publishers, as well as an "open" archive to text in XML markup edition on the Web.

VI. On-Going Training and Developmental Efforts

ETANA will provide funding for representatives to attend meetings among ANE scholars on topics relevant to the development of ETANA. Representatives will participate in conversations among archaeologists to develop standards and commonly acceptable structures for the collection of archaeological field data and electronic publication of research reports. Other conversations, already underway in early stages (such as defining standards for the expansion of UNICODE to non-alphabetic languages relevant to ANE studies) will also be supported. ETANA will host training sessions at professional meetings of ANE scholars on the use digital materials in their teaching and research.

VII. Archival Preservation

ETANA will apply the latest acceptable standards of custodial and managerial responsibility for the electronic site/archive through migration, mirror sites, and other developing technological solutions. CWRU will provide a primary mirror site for storage and archiving of all digital data in the ETANA collection. Archived data in this site will include uncompressed files of the highest resolution available. Uncompressed TIFF images are the current format of choice for visual materials; for text, 600 dpi bitonal groups of images are the standard. This site would be regularly and frequently backed up and refreshed through an automated system. Emulation and/or migration to newer generations of technology must be accompanied by both manual checks as well as checks for accurate software, proven to detect errors. Technical staff at CWRU will assist with the development of such software or in the modification and enhancement of existing verification software. As the preservation of digital data is still the subject of much controversy, CWRU will document experience with preservation strategies in terms of cost, scalability, and technical feasibility, with the goal of gaining a comprehensive view of the economics of long-term preservation of scholarly materials in electronic formats.

VIII. Standards and Access

The resources developed by the ETANA project will be constructed according to the latest standards for interoperability, such as those of the Open Archives Initiative (archive metadata) and W3C (data exchange/preservation and Web access). Significant portions of those resources, such as the ATK, the Scholar's Commons, and the Core Texts segments of ETANA will be freely open to scholars. Publisher agreements will govern access to materials held in the "born digital" portion of the project.