UCLA, Berkeley to catalog Iraqi relics

Six American institutions have won a total of $559,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage. The grants, to be announced this week, are the first manifestation of the agency’s new initiative, “Recovering Iraq’s Past,” designed to help preserve and document the war-torn nation’s cultural resources and to develop educational programs for Iraqi librarians, archivists and conservators.

The University of California emerged as the biggest player, with two grants to develop online catalogs of cuneiform material housed at Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad. UCLA received $96,588 to catalog cuneiform tablets that document 3,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization. UC Berkeley won $99,357 to catalog 5,000 cuneiform texts with images of the tablets, transcriptions and annotations. Results of both projects will be incorporated into the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, a database created by UCLA in 2000. The catalog to be compiled by UCLA will also be available on a website at the museum.

The award with the broadest artistic and geographic sweep -- $100,000 to compile an inventory of Iraqi archeological and historic sites -- went to the World Monuments Fund in New York. Two of those sites, Nineveh and Nimrud, will have their conservation needs assessed through a $65,510 grant to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

The other grants will benefit libraries, archives and those who maintain them. Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., won $97,000 to create an Arabic tutorial on the treatment and care of books, manuscripts, image and recorded sound collections, papyrus and clay tablets. The course will be available on the Internet and a CD-ROM. Simmons College in Boston received $100,000 for an education and training program for 25 Iraqi librarians and archivists.