AN ARMY OF EDITORS. I hope.

This story is reminiscent of the decision of the U.S. Government to release the Arabic documents from Saddam's Iraq online so that anyone who knows Arabic can sort through them and perhaps find interesting things. Now Cambridge University and the AHRC are doing the same thing with many thousands of unpublished fragments in Hebrew, Arabic, etc., from the Cairo Geniza.

Piecing together the Medieval Middle East

General Science : April 10, 2006

An important collection of ancient Jewish and Arabic documents, equal in significance to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and discovered as fragments in an old storeroom, has received a major grant for its upkeep. The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection, housed at Cambridge University Library, has been awarded a £475,000 grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. This will pay for the description, cataloguing and digitization of a substantial part of the total 140,000 fragments, vital in making this unique collection accessible to scholars and lay people worldwide.

[...]

When I heard about the release of the Iraqi documents I wondered whether anyone was planning to do something similar with the Cairo Geniza texts and I was even planning to write a blog post suggesting the idea. This is being done on a small scale alread on the Giluy Milta B'alma blog, but what is needed is the release of all or most of the documents that no one is currently working on. Now it's being done, and I look forward to seeing the texts, many of which are of extraordinary importance for the study of late antique Judaism. I hope the online publication leads to many new doctoral dissertations, articles, and monographs.

While we're at it, does anyone know whether anything similar is planned for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri? I know lots of the material is already online, but my impression is that these are published rather than unpublished texts. Is that correct? Are there plans to put more online?

UPDATE: As I look more closely at the article, it doesn't say explicitly that the digitized material is going online, although that seems to be implied at the end of the quoted paragraph. Does anyone know for sure?

UPDATE: Roberto Labanti points me to the original press release on the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit website, which answers my question and has more details:

At the end of three years, it should be possible to search the online database of the new material on our web-site, to read the catalogue-entry and to view complete and detailed images of the fragments described in the course of the project.

This is an ambitious aim - requiring the researchers to describe an estimated 16,000 fragments and the Library's Imaging Department to produce an estimated 32,000 digital images - but one confidently within the Unit's reach, given the professionalism and experience of its staff and the introduction of new technology to the Imaging Department.

By the way, a number of you have written to say that the "blogger at paleojudaica" e-mail address is not working. As soon as I get a chance, I'll try to track down the problem. Meanwhile, you can reach me at my University address: "jrd4 at st-andrews dot ac dot uk".