Our Libraries and Archives team met in Amman in February and spent 4 enjoyable and productive days together. Alice Lubbock, Archives and Repository Manager from London, and Qasem Abu Harb, Archivist from Jerusalem, travelled to Jordan to join the Amman team for a workshop.
On the first day, the team looked at the benefits of Adobe Bridge for image organisation, and Dr Fatma Marii took the group to the Jordan Museum, and shared her insights and knowledge about the history of the museum and the exhibits. CBRL trustee, Robert Bewley, and Bashar Tabbah, who work on the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East; and Dr Victoria Sainsbury, an archaeologist from University of Oxford, joined the team on the museum outing.
On the second day, the Libraries and Archives teams looked at the manual addition of new Collections to the Digital Repository. Umm Ahmed had prepared an incredible lunch of Maqluba. The team then headed to the Columbia Global Center Amman in the Dabouq neighbourhood in the evening for a lecture by Brian Boyd, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University entitled ‘Preoccupations: Whatever Happened to Prehistory in Palestine?’. Brian’s work focusses on the Shuqba caves in the West Bank, where archaeologist Dorothy Garrod, associated with BSAJ, first carried out archaeological excavations in 1928, identifying many remnants of Natufian culture in the caves; and where Brian and his team have been the first to look at it again since. Brian’s team encountered difficulties excavating in this area due to local disagreements over a quarry on the land – you can read about his work here.
Back in the office for the last two days, the Libraries and Archives team developed processes for preserving digital archival files in the cloud, adding Arabic titles to items on the Repository, and selecting the next collections of archive images to be uploaded to the Repository. On Qasem and Alice’s last day in Amman, the office hosted a tasty Arabic breakfast for all the team – organised by Ashraf, who heads our IT services. Working together in-person as a team was hugely beneficial to the development of the Libraries and Archives work, and the team are grateful Dr Jane Humphris for her leadership and support in organising the workshop.
