About SCETI

SCETI Unveils A Redesigned Web Site
The Penn Libraries’ Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) has unveiled its redesigned web site. The new site includes both a more comprehensive view and easier access to the various special collections that have been digitized and made available through SCETI. Each collection has its own individual web site within the SCETI framework and throughout the coming year we will continue to work to establish a consistent look and feel across the collections while targeting the unique information and scholarly aspects of each. A new underlying data architecture project ( the Digital Library Architecture) that is under way will permit access to SCETI’s images through the normal library catalog searches and will facilitate cross-collection searching within SCETI.

Four New or Enhanced Collections Launched

	Penn/Cambridge Genizah Fragment Project Documents from the Cairo Genizah date from the 9th through through the 15th centuries.They catalogue the social, cultural, and religious lives of Jews around the Mediterranean basin. The fragments were discovered in the late 19th century in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, a neighborhood in Old Cairo. While most of the fragments eventually wound up at Cambridge, many came to North America.
	Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Past, Present and Future The Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Histories, Plans and Futures creates a web presentation of the full content of 86 neighborhood planning surveys prepared and published by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission between 1946 and 1990. These reports contain descriptions of current conditions of housing stock; population trends; property turnover; public transportation; community activity. Recommendations are made for future action.
	*Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair* This collection is comprised of over 1,000 items documenting the history of the Dreyfus Affair and its impact on the art, society, and politics of France and the modern world. All of the major events of the Affair represented by original items in the collection.
	*The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive* Located in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania, The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive currently contains over 1800 recordings, primarily in Yiddish and Hebrew. LP phonograph albums, cassettes, and CD's comprise the archive's catalogued holdings.

Two New Scholarly Digital Initiatives Funded

SCETI co-partners with the Penn Museum
In July 2007, SCETI and the American Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology learned that their co-operative IMLS digitization project was approved. SCETI and the Curators of the American Section of the Museum have received a $130,000.00 grant to digitize the Louis Shotridge Tlingit Collection.

The collection includes 343 artifacts and 2100 archival documents including correspondence, notebooks, photographs, maps and drawings. The project is expected to take two years to complete.

Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts Project
In June 2007, Lawrence Schoenberg and Barbara Brizdle and the University of Pennsylvania have joined in partnership to develop Larry Schoenberg’s innovative and widely used database which tracks sales and provenance information related to medieval and early renaissance databases. For over ten years, Larry and Barbara managed the database hiring researchers to cull sales records primarily in auction catalogs and antiquarian book dealers lists and catalogs.

In 2005 the SCETI hosted the database and provided maintenance. Today there are 115,000 records in the database. Larry and Barbara have agreed to fund an ambitious five year project to transform the database into one of the most comprehensive bibliographic resources for the study of primary sources in the field of manuscript studies. http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sdm/

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