Sharing 7,000 Years of Egyptian Culture with the American Research Center in Egypt's Open Access Conservation Archive

FAIN: PW-264060-19

ARCE (Alexandria, VA 22314-1555)
Michelle McMahon (Project Director: July 2018 to May 2019)
Louise Bertini (Project Director: May 2019 to April 2020)
Yasmin El Shazly (Project Director: April 2020 to present)

Planning for a digital archive documenting conservation and preservation work over the last 25 years at 85 historic Egyptian sites dating as early as the sixth millennium BCE, including the creation of collection management policies and manuals. The project would also support pilot work to digitize and make available archival reports, photographs, and born-digital materials for three sites: Shunet al Zebib, a third-millennium BCE mudbrick funerary complex at Abydos in Upper Egypt; the Red Monastery, a fifth-century Coptic monastery near Souhag in Upper Egypt; and the Mosque of Aslam al-Silahdar, a fourteenth-century mosque in the center of Cairo.

Covering the full breadth of 7,000 years of Egyptian history, ARCE stewards a singular archive documenting 85 projects with a concentration of materials on lost or inaccessible sites throughout Egypt. ARCE bears a responsibility to preserve this archive and share its contents. With a two-year Foundations grant, we will create and approve critical collections management policies and manuals and publish a pilot digital archive of three collections. Embedded in the planning and pilot phases are points for testing, feedback and adjustment, with guidance from a multidisciplinary advisory board and input from public audiences and other stakeholders. Publication of ARCE's materials will allow free access for educators, students and the American and Egyptian public to a wide range of digitized resources. Integrated with ARCE's website, the conservation archive will contribute to more comprehensive public understanding of cultural heritage sites in Egypt.

Associated Products

Prototype site for ARCE conservation archives web portal (Web Resource)
Title: Prototype site for ARCE conservation archives web portal
Author: Notch8 (est. 2007), website developer specializing in Ruby on Rails applications
Author: ARCE Archive Project team (Yasmin El Shazly, Andreas Kostopoulos, Talya Stanke, Tessa Litecky)
Abstract: Notch8, a web consultancy based in San Diego, California, is ARCE's development partner on the Conservation Archives web portal front-end. ARCE hired Notch8 to build an Archives web portal interface, as well as harvest digital assets from UCLA Library in order to publish the pilot collections online. Notch8 has been involved with digital repositories since 2016, including multiple Blacklight-based applications like this project. This prototype site eventually will go live in the form of an open access and free to use web portal adopting a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA), in early Fall 2020. The arce/archive web portal will host five different collections (Red Monastery Architectural Conservation, Conservation of Alsam Al Silahdar, The Funerary Enclosure of Shunet El Zebib, Conservation of Luxor Roman Wall Paintings and Tomb of Anen) making available images, reports and graphic documentation to the public.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://staging-arce-web.notch8.cloud/?f%5Bsubject_topic_facet%5D%5B%5D=Temple+of+Luxor+%28Luxor%2C+Egypt%29
Primary URL Description: This URL is a staging site that contractor Notch8 developed and shared with ARCE project team so they can experience the feeling of the interface and work on the desired facets and discuss on possible improvements. Also, staging site ascertains that the forthcoming ARCE conservation archive web portal will resemble the arce.org frontend. There's no fixed timeline to pull down the staging site, and it should be live at least until we have a live production site url to share with the public by early Fall 2020. However a prototype site in working order is not guaranteed as the staging server is more vulnerable and developers might move to different server.In this case the prototype site might not load.

ARCE Conservation Archives Website (Web Resource)
Title: ARCE Conservation Archives Website
Author: ARCE project team (Andreas Kostopoulos, Tessa Litecky, Talya Stanke)
Author: Notch8 (est. 2007) website developer specialising in Ruby on Rails application
Abstract: ARCE with funding from NEH Foundations award digitised, described and published three pilot collections on ARCE Conservation Archives website. Further on ARCE hired a web developer agency, Notch8 based in San Diego, California to develop a front end interface for the website. ARCE shared the digital assets with UCLA Digital Library, to disseminate them on UCLA International Digital Ephemera Project website. UCLA Digital Library partners exposed ARCE's digital assets via an Open Archives Intitiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to Notch8 backend and published on ARCE's Conservation Archives website. The website went live on December 20, 2020 with more than 1,000 unique visitors and 8,900 total visits so far. ARCE has applied a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA), ensuring open access and free to use material to researchers and general public.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://archives.arce.org/
Primary URL Description: The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) collections provide documentation on conservation of historic sites throughout Egypt funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These collections comprise primary of images and reports documenting the conservation process. Currently, the collection on the ARCE Conservation Archives website includes five conservation projects: 1) the conservation of the Roman Wall Paintings at Luxor Temple 2) the Tomb of Anen conservation project 3) the conservation project of the Aslam al Silahdar Mosque 4) the conservation of the Shunet al Zebib Monument in Abydos 5) the Red Monastery Architectural Conservation Project. The total amount of digital records available on the website are 7,583.

OUT OF THE BOX AND ONTO THE WEB – ARCE’s Conservation Archives Goes Online (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: OUT OF THE BOX AND ONTO THE WEB – ARCE’s Conservation Archives Goes Online
Abstract: Since 1994 ARCE has maintained an archive of 78 conservation and documentation projects funded by USAID. The archive comprises important collections of images, reports, and drawings documenting the conservation process for Egyptian cultural heritage sites spanning virtually all of the country’s historical and cultural eras. Until 2016, original data and the majority of ARCE archival holdings remained inaccessible to anyone unable to visit ARCE’s office in Cairo. In 2016, ARCE and the UCLA Library partnered to launch two ARCE archival collections on UCLA’s Digital Library platform, the International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP). The successful processing and publication of ARCE’s first archival digital collection, in parallel with the knowledge acquired by ARCE staff through this partnership, inspired the organization to seek further funding opportunities to continue digitization and publication of the invaluable Conservation Archives. In 2019, ARCE won an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to lay the foundations for digitizing and publishing more collections, including a processing manual and foundational archival policies. The Archives team digitized and published three additional collections on ARCE’s newly published Conservation Archives website, developed in partnership with the UCLA Digital Library. ARCE’s digital collections fulfil an important obligation of scholarship by disseminating the research, and project documentation, thereby expanding public access to richly diverse material in fields such as Egyptology, anthropology, history, religious studies, etc. This paper, presented by Andreas Kostopoulos, ARCE’s project archives specialist includes an overview of the past five years’ digital efforts and challenges, as well as data for the projects currently available on ARCE Conservation Archives website.
Author: Andreas Kostopoulos, Project Archives Specialist-ARCE
Date: 4/24/2021
Location: Vitual presentation for ARCE's Annual Meeting 22-25 April 2021

International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP) UCLA Library (Web Resource)
Title: International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP) UCLA Library
Author: UCLA Library
Abstract: The UCLA Library has launched an innovative and forward-looking initiative to capture ephemeral content with global partners. Through this project, UCLA Library endeavors to build international and global collections of knowledge and to preserve the historical and cultural record so that present and future generations can access and use ephemera that document the larger arena of discourse that takes place alongside mainstream media and scholarly publications. NOTE: The IDEP website is not a grant product under NEH Foundations grant, but it became an integral part of it. The partnership between ARCE-UCLA Library, contributed to the succesful and sustainable completion of the project. This partnership enabled UCLA to harvest the NEH funded digitised collections from ARCE to their collections management system (Islandora) and expose them via OAI-PMH to ARCE's free access Conservation Archives website (funded by NEH Foundations grant) and make the assets discoverable online.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://idep.library.ucla.edu/arce
Primary URL Description: The ARCE collections provide documentation on conservation of historic sites throughout Egypt funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These collections comprise images, drawings, maps, and reports documenting the conservation process. Currently, the collection includes five ARCE conservation projects: the conservation of the Roman Wall Paintings at Luxor Temple, the conservation of Tomb of Anen, the conservation project of the Aslam al Silahdar Mosque, the conservation of the Shunet al Zebib Monument in Abydos, and the Red Monastery architectural conservation project.

ARCE Project Archives: A digitial transformation (Article)
Title: ARCE Project Archives: A digitial transformation
Author: Sally El Sabbahy
Author: Andreas Kostopoulos
Abstract: A year long digital transformation reimagines the ARCE conservation archives. The article describes all the different projects that led to the digitization and online publication of various conservation projects, ARCE had completed over the last 25 years. With generous support from National Endowment of the Humanities, the United States Department of Education and in partnership with UCLA Library and Google Arts and Culture, the archives team has processed, digitized and published on an open access platform thousands of digital records, making Egyptian sites accessile to public.
Year: 2021
Access Model: The Scribe magazine is mailed to 32 scholarly institutions in the US and UK, 235 international recipients and to 1,156 US recipients.
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Scribe: The Magazine of the American Research Center in Egypt
Publisher: American Research Center in Egypt

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