Amira Edan, the director of Iraq’s National Museum, says that soon she will no longer have to worry so much that the famous institution remains closed to the public for fear of violence.
People will just be able to Google it. “It’s really wonderful,” she said Tuesday.
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, had just made a presentation inside the museum, announcing that his company would create a virtual copy of the museum’s collections at its own expense, and make images of four millenniums of archaeological treasures available online, free, by early next year.
For free.
The museum, badly looted during the American invasion, has been declared reopened three times: in 2003, by the American occupation authorities, again in 2007 by Iraqi officials and most recently in February by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
None of those openings, however, involved letting the public back in. A few invited scholars, journalists and the occasional school group have been allowed to visit. Only 8 of the museum’s 26 galleries have been restored; most of the collection’s treasures are in secret storage.
Part of the Bush-Cheney legacy: no planning whatsoever was done, leaving the museum, and more, open to looting and destruction.
What no one at the event mentioned was that the National Museum’s collections had already been digitized, at least in part, by Italy’s National Research Center, under a 1 million euro grant from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The collections went online last June as the Virtual Museum of Iraq.
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