The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) Genazim - FGP Computerization Unit Announcement 7
December 2009
Genazim, the Friedberg Genizah Project's Computerization Unit, is glad to announce the release of Version 7 of its Genizah website, which contains many new and interesting functions and modules, as well as additional data and images, that can greatly enhance the work of researchers engaged in Genizah studies. These new features are described below.
The website can be accessed through <www.genizah.org>, by clicking on "Login" if you are already registered; if not, you are invited to register - it is simple and free - by clicking on "Register". Every newly registered user will have to electronically agree to the "Terms of Use" document (which we urge users to read carefully).

A - Images

Following an agreement signed between Cambridge University Library (CUL) and The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) sometime ago, a jointly designed CUL-FGP ambitious digitalization project, probably one of the largest ever attempted in the world of manuscripts, CUL is going to digitize its entire Genizah collection, producing an estimated set of 350,000 - 400,000 high-quality images of Genizah fragments. The images are planned to be delivered to Genazim and integrated in its website, at a rate of 10,000 images per month.

In version 7 are now displayed 25,000 high-quality digital images of CUL fragments covering mainly boxes F1-F17, Misc 1-11, NS 329, AS 62, 75-95, which include many of theTalmudic and Rabbinica material. Digitization will then proceed by collections, first completing the Misc. boxes and then proceeding with the Arabic series boxes.

Moreover, about 2000 additional images have been added (marked by specific icons), some of them being variants of the main image displayed (different angles, different lightings, etc.), others being high-quality images of parts of a fragment that was too large to be shot as one image, still others being images of handwritten notes that refer to a given image or to the entire shelfmark.

B - New software modules
1. "Side-by-Side"
A user can now ask for two images (such as the recto and verso of the same fragment) to be displayed side-by-side on the screen, for ease of comparison and evaluation. He can also ask to display side-by-side an image and its transcription, or a transcription and the corresponding translation, etc.

2. Full-text
Besides the regular full-text query already available in the site for searching words and expressions in the corpus, a user can now add to a given string the "don't care character" *, so that *X represents any string that ends with X, X* stands for any string that begins with X, etc. The user has full control of the various words generated by such a form and can select the variants to be actually included in the search.

3. The Genizah corpus frequency dictionary
A dynamic frequency dictionary of the Genizah corpus (transcriptions) and of the translations (Hebrew or English) corpus is now available. Typing a string, the system will immediately respond letter-by-letter showing that part of the dictionary consisting of strings that start with the typed sequence.

4. Queries by "frames"
Besides Boolean queries on all fields of the cataloging record already available in the current version, specially on works' titles, the user can now specify exact references ("frames") in his query, such as Hilchot, Perekand Halachah in Mishne Torah, or Book, Chapter and Verse in Bible or Biblical Commentaries fragments (assuming of course that this information is available in the databases).

5. Browsers
Originally developed for the IE 6 (Internet Explorer version 6) and then the IE 7 browsers, the system has now been adapted to the IE 8, to the Firefox and to the Safari browsers, and in fact to the Mac machine. As might be expected, some unexpected delicate combinations may still cause different behavior in different browsers, and we would be grateful to our users if they will report to us such slight malfunctioning.

Finally a few available functions, such as Workspace, Transcriptions display, as well as the handling of sessions' durations and interruptions, have been improved.

C - Data
About 32,000 new bibliographical references to Genizah shelfmarks have been added to the databases and to the website.

We remind our users that for CUL shelfmarks, the set of such references is complete and exhaustive till 2008.

For other (non-CUL) shelfmarks, the set of references is complete and exhaustive for all Hebrew journals' publications and for all essential Genizah-related Hebrew books, published till 2004. We are working on completing the task for all Hebrew publications till 2008. The work on non-Hebrew publications (for non-CUL shelfmarks) will follow.

Some 25,000 new identifications and cataloging data from various sources - including many hand-lists - have been added, as well as about 370 transcriptions and 650 translations.

Note: In a few rare cases some of the material available at Genazim could not be displayed, since permission from the relevant libraries or authors has not yet been received. These cases are clearly indicated in the site.

Your suggestions and comments on the new version are, as always, most welcome.