Dear Friends and Users of Biblindex,
This is the first collective mailing we send you, to keep you informed of the latest developments of the project or new features on the site. By the way, we’ll also check the registered email addresses and remove wrong accounts. Today you’re 1,404, from 58 different countries, who have already registered on Biblindex; every day, the site receives about 80 visits. We also received a lot of supporting messages, expressing high expectations about the site growth. These figures and reactions mean our project met worldwide a significant echo, and we are obviously delighted about this. Biblindex's vocation is to become a participating site, where each user can become a contributor by correcting data or sharing the biblical quotations or allusions he found: the larger the user community is, the better the available tool will be.
However, we now face a major difficulty. Indeed, when we opened the site in December 2008, we hoped to obtain financial support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) in 2009. Unfortunately, we learnt in June that the submitted project was rejected, but we do not have yet any clue, nor report explaining the failure.
We will try again to obtain public funding, particularly from the Rhône-Alpes Regional Council, without whom the site would never have come into being; but we must add any private funds to these potential resources: So if you have any ideas of foundations or sponsors to whom we could address, please let us know! Of course each of you can also make a donation, on a regular or occasional basis, a Paypal button has been placed on all pages of the site: the funds are paid to the Association of “Sources Chrétiennes”’s Friends (AASC on the receipt), and will be used specifically for Biblindex development. We absolutely need your help to go onwards: without IT development, we won’t be able to create the virtual community of scholars and researchers we need to collect biblical quotations and expand the corpus. This is really the first step, thank you in advance for your help!
However, in order not to conclude on a negative note, let’s point out the very limited indeed, but positive prospects of this summer. The Rhône-Alpes Regional Council, which agreed to support the project in 2009 up to € 2,500 (inclusive of tax), will significantly help us to improve the search form. Besides, an IT developer works by us on placement since June 15th until September 25th, to provide the Sources Chrétiennes team a way to work on the database through the intranet. Newsletter No. 2 will focus on these advances.
This newsletter is sent to all registered users of Biblindex. If you do not wish to receive it, please send a mail to biblindex.sc@mom.fr. If you wish to have it sent to your colleagues, friends and associations, etc., give us their e-mail addresses. Moreover, if you are in charge of an institution working in the area of Christian Literature in Late Antiquity, you can link to our website on yours, by indicating the following address: http://www.biblindex.net/index.php?lang=en. Many registrations already came through links placed on blogs or institutional pages, this information diffusion is a great way to help us.
For the Biblindex team, Laurence Mellerin
Posts
