Info Of Milestones: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Of The Oriental Institute's Website

During Apr 2019 nosotros volition overstep the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oriental Institute's Website.  In the months next the annunciation of the first proposal for an HTML specification inwards 1993, John Sanders as well as I, encouraged past times Bill Sumner - the Director of the Oriental Institute, engaged inwards conversations amongst computing personnel at the University of Chicago as well as began to draft a proposal for an html document server at the Oriental Institute. We debuted this sever inwards Apr 1994 on a Macintosh figurer operated past times the University of Chicago’s Computer Science Department Macintosh Laboratory. H5N1 bare-bones history of the website is here, as well as the laid out is described:

Development of the OI WWW database was a collaboration betwixt John Sanders, Head of the Oriental Institute Computer Laboratory, as well as Charles Jones, Oriental Institute Research Archivist. We had a unmarried objective inwards creating this database: to convey information nearly the Oriental Institute accomplish a world-wide audience through the medium of electronic publication; to brand available descriptions as well as publications of the projects inwards ancient Near Eastern archeology as well as philology past times the faculty as well as staff of the Oriental Institute as well as its diverse units, the Oriental Institute Museum, as well as the Department of Near Eastern Languages as well as Civilizations (NELC), the University of Chicago.

The OI WWW database originally contained electronic versions of iii Institute publications.

• Highlights From The Collection
• 1991-92 Annual Report
• 1992-93 Annual Report

The purpose of the database entitled “Highlights from the Collection” contains registration as well as descriptive information along amongst digital images for 65 artifacts from the Oriental Institute Museum. These artifacts stand upward for a cross-section of the cultural regions as well as historical periods contained inwards the museum’s entire collection.

The Oriental Institute Annual Report entries inwards the database include information nearly the Institute’s museum, question projects, as well as the private scholarship of faculty as well as staff members. These reports are arranged inwards the next categories:

• Oriental Institute Museum
• Oriental Institute Research Projects
• Archaeology
• Philology
• Individual Scholarship
• Oriental Institute Departments
• Oriental Institute Faculty as well as Staff

 John as well as I both besides hash out it inwards the OI 1993–1994 Annual Report.

Like most people playing amongst the WWW at the time, nosotros didn't actually empathise what nosotros were doing. Nevertheless the website was wildly successful as well as the Oriental Institute became a leader inwards what eventually came to hold out known equally opened upward access publication - All of the OI's formal scholarly published output is available costless of accuse to anyone amongst assess to the web.

One of the things nosotros did non catch was how to save past times iterations of the website, as well as equally a trial the earliest archived version at the Internet Archive is from 8 June 1997. Click through to remember  (and possibly cringe at) the expert quondam unsophisticated Web of the 1990s.

One of the early on components of the OI's Web presence was ABZU (Index to Ancient Near Eastern Resources on the Internet).   Abzu became a element of ETANA, a multi-institutional collaborative projection initiated inwards August 2000, equally an electronic publishing projection designed to heighten the study of the history as well as civilization of the ancient Near East. Funded initially past times a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, thus past times a larger digitization grant from the same foundation, the ETANA spider web portal was launched inwards 2001.  The ETANA steering commission had no means to anticipate the majority digitization of schioarly materials that commenced inwards the mid-2000s which convey revolutionized access to scholarly materials inwards the 21st centiry.  AWOL is the successor to Abzu straightaway twenty-five years later. We believe Abzu as well as AWOL to hold out the longest sustained endeavour to document as well as disseminate the evolution of online opened upward access scholarship inwards whatsoever field.