ETANA-Abzu-news

as announced on Ioudaios List.
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new mailing list that will serve to inform the public of developments at ETANA: Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives, and of additions
to Abzu, ETANA's guide to the ancient Near East on-line. Instructions for adding your address to the list can be found at:

https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ETANA-Abzu-news

The ETANA project seeks to serve as a model of how a discipline-specific content site in ancient Near Eastern Studies can be constructed to become the dominant site for that discipline. ETANA
will take a leadership role in developing standards specific to this discipline, test altruistic funding models, utilize OpenArchive metadata standards and create discipline-specific harvest engines to work with these metadata. ETANA will create a structure whereby scholarship can be accessible from data capture to finished scholarship on a single site. It will host data capture and access, core texts and born-digital publications in an environment of rights management, appropriate levels of peer review, and archival
permanence. ETANA encompasses the primary portal in ancient Near Eastern Studies: Abzu, and the multiple rich image databases being created in the discipline.
ETANA is a cooperative project of:
American Oriental Society | American Schools of Oriental Research | Case Western Reserve University | Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State | Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago | Society of Biblical Literature | Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University | Vanderbilt University | Virginia Polytechnic and State University.
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Etana turns out to be an excellent site for students of Philo and his social world too. But it makes me think about how long it is useful to keep up all these other collections of links like my own site, NTGateway, and others. I know from my own work that it eats my time, and I can't imagine how Mark Goodacre gets time to keep up his great site as a one-man work...
Have we reached the point where we should seriously consider coordinating more of this work, get some sponsors, and establish a team to work on a really megasite for Biblical studies? Viewpoints are welcome....