Gennadeion Goes Digital
Map of Bay of Navarino being scanned.
In June 2006, a successful proposal for funding from the EU under the Greek “Information Society” program was made. The aim was to digitize, catalog, and publicly present four corpora of images and texts from among the School’s collections: The field records of the Corinth excavations; the Dorothy Burr Thompson photographic collection and other archaeological photographs in the ASCSA Archives; the correspondence from the Ion Dragoumis collection in the Gennadius Archives; and a subset of the scrapbooks of John Gennadius, from the Gennadius Library.
On confirmation that funding had been received, the proposal was sent out to a public tender in accordance with Greek law, and a successful bid was received from a consortium of Lambrakis Press S.A., one of the largest companies in Greece, and RACTI (Research Academic Computer Technology Institute), a well known academic institution. Each of these organizations has a strong involvement in cultural preservation policy initiatives in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.
The consortium’s bid included three components: The development and deployment of the necessary computer infrastructure; the digitization and documentation of the selected materials; and the development of a “cultural portal” and digital educational system to make the scanned materials available to the public.
Since late 2007, the implementation of the project has been underway. The scanning of the 3,000 Dragoumis letters is almost complete, while the digitization of the 16 sample scrapbooks of Joannes Gennadius is proceeding very satisfactorily. The latter is a huge project because there are multiple images on each page of each book. In total, the project will involve the scanning and cataloging of an expected 32,480 images.
A digital “educational application” is under development, describing the life and work of Joannes Gennadius and presenting the highlights of the collection that he built. This will also provide an introduction to the digitized collection which will be launched in May 2008.