US & Iraq to Step Up Cultural Preservation Efforts

The NY Times reported that the US and Iraq have launched a $14 million program to help preserve Iraq's cultural heritage. Funds will be used to "create a conservation and historic preservation institute in Erbil, help refurbish the Iraqi National Museum and train museum employees." This is a significant step forward in efforts to cultivate and preserve Iraq's cultural heritage. The US will also continue its efforts to recover thousands of artifacts that were looted from Iraq's National Museum in 2003.

WFU Creates Digital Artifact Database

Wake Forest University's Museum of Anthropology recently unveiled an online database of its entire collection, consisting of over 26,000 artifacts. You can search the collection by country to find objects from a particular region or culture. The database also allows users to search for a specific type of artifact across cultures. The project was made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and another recently awarded IMLS grant will allow the museum to expand the database to include archival records, such as photographs and maps.

UPenn to Digitize its Collection

Reuter’s reported that the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will be digitizing the approximately 1 million artifacts in its collection and uploading them to the internet. This initiative will open up the collection, 95 percent of which is in storage, to scholars, researchers, and the general public. Perhaps the most famous pieces at PENN are those from an excavation of the royal tombs of Ur in southern Iraq that were part of the Sumerian civilization of approximately 2500 BC. The project will take about 3 years to complete, but it should be well worth the wait.