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Digitization efforts and the reasons that they are undertaken depend upon the institution and its ultimate goal. Most institutions want to preserve their collections by making them accessible in a surrogate (copy) form, so that patrons and researchers can use them without compromising the original source materials. According to the article, A Digital Library for Cuneiform on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website, in the case of cuneiform tablets, the goal is to allow researchers from all over the world to have access to the tablets so that they may be studied, translated, and understood.[1]
According to the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) article The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, digitization will help researchers to develop better research tools such as “a reliable palaeography charting the graphic development of cuneiform, and a lexical and grammatical glossary of the approximately 120,000 texts inscribed during this period of early state formation.” It will also allow for cross-discipline study of topics ranging from social and cultural development, politics, and economics, etc.[2]
The National Endowment for the Humanities has started an initiative called “Recovering Iraq's Past” to “preserve and document Iraq's cultural resources and to develop education and training opportunities for Iraq's librarians, archivists, and preservation specialists.”[3] This initiative is coordinated through “the U. S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies to assist in rebuilding the cultural heritage infrastructure in Iraq.”[4] There is an increased urgency to digitize these priceless treasures because of the destruction that is taking place in Iraq due to the war and subsequent insurgencies during this time of transition for the Iraqi government. It is feared that they will be lost forever.
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