The big news for 2013 was CPART’s agreement with the Vatican Apostolic Library to continue the Syriac manuscript research and publication project. The next phase of the project will focus on 80 Vatican Syriac manuscripts. These manuscripts will appear online, be freshly catalogued, studied, and made the subject of an academic conference. Of course, we haven’t just been waiting around for these 80 splendid manuscripts to be photographed! This year we published online digital facsimiles of over two-hundred Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, and Garshuni manuscripts from the Brown Collection. And we plan to publish hundreds more manuscripts from this and other collections in the coming years. A steady stream of CPART Student assistants is essential to the production and delivery of such resources. Working with such brilliant people is another highlight of 2013.
The links that punctuate this report are only possible because in 2013 CPART launched a dynamic website and a Facebook page. This new site has been a long time coming, but we hope it was worth waiting for! The website is the forum for publishing CPART content and resources, while the Facebook page delivers news about CPART projects and publications, together with news and other resources relating to the study of manuscripts, manuscripts culture, Syriac studies, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other good stuff.
Looking forward to 2014, I’m particularly excited about these five things:
- The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library: Biblical Scrolls will be published by E. J. Brill.
- The BYU-Oxford Syriac Corpus project will begin annotating the complete works of Ephrem the Syrian.
- The Texts & Tools series will be launched with two great reference tools for working with Ephrem the Syrian.
- The Genesis Rewritten site will be launched, featuring the bibliography of Genesis in the Anglo-Saxon tradition prepared by Bert Fuller.
- I will celebrate ten years as the Director of CPART.