The on-line Codex Sinaiticus

If you like antiquities, sacred texts, or modern technology applied to digital collections, you'll be sure to enjoy the Codex Sinaiticus.

Digitally Born

Given that this was published last year, I am sure everyone else here at SIS has read John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives(New York: Basic Books, 2008). The authors, both lawyers, explore the brave new world of people born after 1980 when social digital technologies came online. They consider how these individuals work and think differently and the implications for their lives of working online. Palfrey and Gasser look at identity, dossiers, privacy, safety, creation and innovation, piracy, quality, information overload, learning, and so forth. Along the way they drop comments that relate to us, such as: "Libraries should serve as a digital heritage center. The works of Digital Natives, and of everyone else living in the digital age, may well be less likely to be preserved than the writins of ninth-century monks on sturdy parchment. Librarians should think in terms of collections that will preserve this digital heritage for future generations" (p. 252). As this quotation probably indicates, this is a popular book with broad strokes. It does make you think a bit more about your increasingly younger students, however, and it is a useful exercise to read it in this light.

University Presses

Thomas Bacher, director of the University of Akron Press, has a brief essay in Inside Higher Education, where he discusses some of the challenges facing university presses. He acknowledges that the Internet and “digital information networks” “have made the printed book less important. Bacher argues for expanding university press publishing into disciplines “driving the current educational and research enterprises” (such as “science, engineering, technology”) and to connecting university presses “with the strengths of their home institutions.” He wants university presses to “become part of the new information infrastructure of the university,” and while he does not see the end of the printed book he also does not believe that the traditional book can be the primary answer or service offered by the university press. Personally, I do not believe that we, the university and its academic units like professional schools, have ever exploited the value of the book (whether in printed form or digital venue). There is a vast literature, offered by many disciplines, about the relevance (usually concluded to be, at best, a mixed bag) of their research and scholarship for public policy and public knowledge. Bacher hints at this very issue when he writes: “I had a recent conversation with a prominent engineering dean. He wanted to know why I was visiting, since his faculty was intent on getting published in Elsevier journals. I wasn’t the least bit surprised, but did mention perhaps some of his faculty might write “little books” on very narrow subjects. Basically, these books would be an extension of an existing journal article or an adaptation of class notes with the purpose of covering a topic, but keeping in line with the way faculty communicate in those fields. He thought the idea might work, but reminded me that his faculty was immersed in teaching and research, so that finding spare time for an endeavor that had negligible tenure impact would be hard.” I wish he would have commented more on this. What about all those faculty who have tenure? What about the historic mission of the university to contribute knowledge to society? You can find his article, “Books Aren’t Everything,” at http://www.insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/views/2009/06/30/bacher

Online Education

The US Department of Education has released a new study on online learning, described by Scott Jaschlik, “The Evidence on Online Education, Inside Higher Education, available at
http://www.insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/news/2009/06/29/online.
“The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took ‘blended’ courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.” This “meta-analysis” draws on “more than 1,000 empirical studies of online learning that were published from 1996 through July 2008”, using “a small number (51) of independent studies that met strict criteria.”

Putting the Pieces Together

Posted on behalf of Bernadette Callery

Museum International, volume 61, nos. 1-2, 2009. Conference proceedings of the 2008 “Athens International Conference on the Return of Cultural Objects to their Countries of Origin” held at the New Acropolis Museum.

Predictably, the opening of the New Acropolis Museum has fanned the fires of the repatriation debate over the return of the pieces of the Parthenon frieze to Athens – a fire that has been smoldering in the media since 1809 when Lord Byron published his “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” Byron berates Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, for purchasing and removing those sculptural elements for display in London, wasting
“useless thousands on the Phidian freaks,
Mis-shapen monuments, and maimed antiques;
And make their grand saloons a general mart
For all the mutilated blocks of art.”

This theme of the media’s involvement in the removal and restitution of cultural property continues in the postings of culture journalist Lee Rosenbaum and her CultureGrrl blog at http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/ - a useful source of breaking news in the world of art politics. Rosenbaum was also a contributor to the recently published issue of Museum International, vol. 61, nos. 1-2, 2009, the conference proceedings of the 2008 “Athens International Conference on the Return of Cultural Objects to their Countries of Origin” held at the New Acropolis Museum.

Readily available through the wonders of license agreements and full-text retrieval via Pittcat, many of the articles in this themed issue of Museum International are triumphant case studies of the return or reunification of cultural property. In her final synthesis of the conference, Elena Korka, Director for Documentation and Protection of Cultural Objects at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, notes that these cases “refer to objects, monuments or human remains removed from their countries of origin before 1970 – that is, before the UNESCO Convention – and whose return met with success as a result of a series of actions and long negotiations.” Social, legal, and archaeological issues are discussed by cultural ministers, tribal representatives, law professors, structural engineers, museum curators, archaeologists, and journalists, assuring that many voices are heard.

What particularly struck me were the legal maneuverings as claimants move through the dialectic dance, pausing to nod to the UNESCO Convention and its supporting legislation in the ratifying countries, the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, and the ICOM Code of Ethics. Mediation by interested scholars appears to have an impact in supporting national claims and they appear to be some of the most effective negotiators. One of these voluntary returns reunited the head and body of one of the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe, bringing together the upper part of the sculpture, which had remained in Zimbabwe, with the lower part, which was removed from the site by adventurers in the late nineteenth century. The much-traveled lower part of the figure came to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium for the 1998 “Legacies of Stone: Zimbabwe Past and Present” exhibition, by way of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, Leipzig and St. Petersburg, as yet another example of the cultural dislocations of World War II. The conditions of the unification of this spiritually significant object and its return to the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe were that there was to be no blood shed throughout the transfer, and that the transfer be recognized as a long-term loan from Germany to Zimbabwe. This nice distinction between possession and ownership is also one of the points of argument in the ongoing call for the return of the Parthenon marbles from the British Museum to the New Acropolis Museum, in which Britain recently offered a three-month loan of the marbles to the Acropolis Museum on the condition that Greece recognizes Britain’s ownership of the sculptures.

All such acts of cultural removal have substantial political overtones, as can be seen in the discussion of the return of the Axum obelisk or stelae, removed in 1935 from Axum, Ethopia, by personal order of Benito Mussolini for re-erection in Rome. As noted in Tullio Scovazzi’s article on the legal aspects of the Axum Obelisk case, Mussolini’s removal of the obelisk consciously drew a “direct parallel with the Roman Empire, also known to have plundered booty from the cities it annexed.” The sheer engineering feat of the removal, return and reconstruction of this 150 ton, 24 meter tall structure underlines the ease with which developing countries, albeit ancient cultures, can be exploited by developed ones – as well as the lengths to which megalomaniacs will go to have their whims gratified.

The chief virtue of many of these returns was the re-establishment of the spiritual value of the objects and their reintegration into the cultural environment of their creators. Collaborative loans, the most plausible of the solutions currently posed for the “Parthenon Marbles,” was illustrated by the actual case study of the reciprocal loan for exhibition of a Sumerian statue, now with its head and body reunited, which will be shared between the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Warning those of us who think that digitization is necessarily a Good Thing, especially as it allows us to virtually reassemble the pieces of culturally disassociated materials, George W. Anastassopoulos, Permanent Delegate of Greece to UNESCO, and President of the 34th session of the General Conference of UNESCO, reminds us in his foreword that it ain’t necessarily so. There he notes that “some of the more determined traditionalists, with the help of new information and communication technologies, are setting themselves up as proponents of digital repatriation – a convenient but pale excuse for old collections to stay where they are, offering cultures that have been plundered the meagre compensation of access to cultures without a soul. It was thus no accident at all that the 34th session of UNESCO's General Conference should assert in 2007 that virtual access to cultural property cannot supplant the enjoyment of such property in its original and authentic setting.”

I recommend this collection for its case study approach and excellent legal overviews of the negotiations to anyone dealing with the ethics as well as the practical mechanics of preserving cultural property. These strongly argued articles will certainly be required reading for next year’s Museum Archives course.