Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. The estimate of the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections exceeds 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 230,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.

The UCLA Digital Library Program and the CDLI have been working together since early 2007 to ensure the long-term digital preservation of CDLI images and transliterations and to increase access to this unique content. The objectives of the collaboration include:

• Improvement of the CDLI web interface to facilitate use by contributors, instructors, students, and independent researchers
• Migration of metadata and content from CDLI's database and file systems into the UCLA Digital Library Program's Digital Library Collection System (DLCS)
• Deposit of CDLI master images and metadata into the University of California's Digital Preservation Repository
• Expanded use of the collection by including more material types, including additonal images of cuneiform tablets, transcriptions, transliterations, and translations

This collaboration has been funded in part by a generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Read the full grant narrative.