Preserving Afghanistan's Silk Road Art: A Virtual Catalogue of the Begram Ivory and Bone Carvings
Sanjyot Mehendale, University of California, Berkeley
sanjyotm@berkeley.edu

Supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Begram Ivory and Bone Carvings publication is a preservation project involving one of the most extensive sets of finds formerly housed in the National Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan, almost all of which are now gone – looted, sold on the black market, or destroyed. These magnificent carvings – several hundred in number – are unparalleled yet paradigmatic examples of the syncretic nature of Silk Road art and cultural exchange from the early Common Era. Their total disappearance would constitute an irreparable loss to scholars, to non-academic devotees of the Silk Road, and to the cultural heritage of Central Asia. There is a urgent need to preserve a thorough and accurate record of these finds so that they may continue to bear witness to the richness of cultural exchange between East and West along the ancient Silk Roads, and so that they might be studied anew by scholars seeking to locate them within refigured understandings of ancient Central Asian cultures.

The virtual collection of the Begram ivory and bone objects combines text and images in a searchable database. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the objects and contains information about the pictorial themes and motifs, shapes, materials, and iconography. As the only extant complete record of this set of Begram finds, the catalogue is designed to be accessible worldwide via the Internet, both to scholars and to the general public. The project will serve as an accurate record of what has been lost, and aid Afghan curators in reconstructing databases of the Museum’s erstwhile finds. Moreover, the project aspires to be a research tool for academics, students and the general public which brings into one database for the first time since the original excavation reports, the collections from both Musee Guimet and Kabul Museum.

A Review on Current Development for Open Access and Its Implications for
Scholarly Communication
Arthur Ya-Ning Chen, Academia Sinica
arthur@gate.sinica.edu.tw

The initiative of open access is founded to ensure the access to scholarly information resources and to solve the issue of serials crisis in order to facilitate scholarly communication and research development for innovation. This paper adopts meta-analysis as research methodology to explore what the aspects of open access are, based on selected documents' review, case studies, and data analysis on Directory of Open Access Journal. This paper is composed of nine parts in the following: origins, definition, methodology, declarations, current development, data analysis of Directory of Open Access Journal, findings, related issues, as well as conclusion and suggestion.