Dear colleagues and friends,

We are happy to announce that the new Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) infrastructure and website are ready to be tested. 

The test site can be accessed at this url: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/

Please use https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ instead of https://cdli.ucla.edu whenever possible, until the new framework is ready to be deployed on all servers of the project, including UCLA. 

At this time, we would like to solicit your feedback expressly on issues that make you unable to do your research or teaching work as usual while using the new site, such as finding artifact entries and looking at transliterations. Please email cdli-support@orinst.ox.ac.uk detailing any such issue you face. 

We are aware of many other issues and reporting those at this time would not be helpful since we already have reports filed for many. If you still would like to communicate some other issues, you can do so by emailing cdli-support@orinst.ox.ac.uk, but please only do after searching the issue tracker (https://gitlab.com/cdli/framework/-/issues) to make sure your issue has not yet been flagged.   

There are still many features in the pipeline, some closer to release than others. We will inform you when the most important ones are rolled out. Additionally, the data is slightly older on the test framework but no major updates to CDLI data are planned anytime soon. 

Join our mailing lists to receive announcements about cdli in general https://groups.google.com/g/cdli-gen, and about technical and feature updates: https://groups.google.com/g/cdli-tech.

This new infrastructure and interface is the fruit of many years of work, countless hours by dozens of volunteers, students assistants, and dedicated colleagues. Funding and resources have been provided for this development by the following funding agencies: NEH, SSHRC, DFG, the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford, and the General Fund for Assyriology at Wolfson College, Oxford  (through the Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages project [H. D. Baker,  C. Chiarcos, R. K. Englund PIs (coordinated by myself)], CDLI Framework Update project [R. K. Englund, & myself], CDLI Broadening Participation Project (J. L. Dahl & myself), the Linked dictionaries seed project (myself)), and the following institutions or groups: University of Oxford, Wolfson College, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Compute Canada, and HumTech (through J. L. Dahl, J. Renn, H. D. Baker, R. K. Englund, and now the NELC department at UCLA/Pourdavoud Center). I cannot name every person that has provided an essential contribution to this achievement but I would like to highlight Christian Chiarcos's invaluable participation in expanding CDLI's horizons through state-of-the-art contributions and Lars Willighagen's polished contributions to our codebase.   

Of course, the CDLI could not be what it is without the sustained support of visitors/users, and every and each person who has contributed or aided in the contribution of catalogue data, text, and images, to the cdli. This includes collection staff and enthusiastic members of the public too. Some of these people are listed on the new Collaborators and Staff page (https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/staff).

We hope you enjoy the new cdli interface!

On behalf of the CDLI:

Émilie (Pagé-Perron)