The Digital Nineveh Archives is designed to give a diverse audience access to the rich content within the archives or linked through it to content provided by other partners. The site is intentionally ‘shallow’ and avoids deep links in order to help visitors get to the content they are interested in quickly. Every link can be reached in no more than three clicks.

1. Header. Bilingual header appears on all pages. The Arabic text is predominant in the Arabic version of the site.

2. Main content area. Following a widescreen format to accommodate most browsers, content is loaded into this area when users click on elements in the site. The background for each area – Timelines, Technologies, Partners, Archives, etc – anchors the floating content window.

3. Arabic/English Buttons. On the home page, the introductory movie demonstrates the bilingual nature of the site and provides of an overview of its content.

4. Hide text to show background. All of the images used in the DNA site are from the archives. For those interested, clicking on ‘View Background Image’ hides the text and points the user to the image in the archive.

5. Perpetual Navigation Bar. The content bar is on every page in the site and allows all content to be accessed. Content is organized into timelines, themes, archives, maps, technologies and how to contribute.

6. Arabic / English toggle. The core ten areas of the site are fully translated into English and Arabic. For aesthetic, technological and readability reasons, the core pages needed to be presented in primary English or primary Arabic. All deeper content is bilingual where possible, or offered in the native language of the item or article.

7. Reader accessible footer / text only site. Buried in the header code are the appropriate triggers for accessibility readers (visually or physically impaired). The entire site is transcribed into a text only format, English and Arabic. Credits for the site and NEH disclaimer are perpetual on all pages.

Digital Nineveh Archives Site Requirements
Please contact us for an Arabic version of this text

The content of the Digital Nineveh Archives is accessible without the need of any special plug-ins. However, in order to experience the interactives or the user interface, the Flash plug-in is required. Adobe Flash is the “most pervasive software platform … reaching over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets.” We require version 6 of the Flash Player (the current version is 9), which is installed in 97.4% of Internet-enabled desktops, over 838 million users. Flash Player is the engine behind YouTube. (see http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/).

Why Flash? Flash provides a seamless web experience, motion, video, audio, as well as data driven sites. Most importantly, Flash solved our multi-lingual requirement, and has become a standard for interactive websites produced for the public due to its ubiquity. Without Flash, we would not have been able to deliver a truly bilingual website, because there is no way to effectively control font and graphical elements in html.

The archives - the database and galleries produced for the assets - has minimal requirements, a modern web browser and JavaScript enabled in order to function.
Windows OS: Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, Netscape 7.0 or higher, Firefox.
Mac OS: Internet Explorer 5.2 or higher, Netscape 7.0 or higher, or Safari 1.1 or higher, Firefox.

A Proposed Mapping and Geospatial Roadmap for the DNA

The spatial component of the Digital Nineveh Archives provides a means of assembling and displaying spatially referenced data from the research projects that have been conducted over the years at Nineveh and the vicinity. The Digital Nineveh Archives currently contains points, polygons and georeferenced imagery from a GIS based project that has been exported to a standards-compliant web browser format. The basemap imagery available on Google maps for the Mosul area is reasonably high quality and current, and we are therefore able to use this reference layer behind the GIS based archives and allow site visitors to use the Google map tools for panning and zooming while browsing the DNA spatial data.

While the current web project provides good spatial context for site visitors as well as links to future resources online for each of the major features, there is considerable potential for further development in this venue. A number of open source web projects have become available that could be used to host the Digital Nineveh spatial data online, and these open projects offer greater potential than the Google tools for customization by us as developers. One particularly promising open source development environment is OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org/) from the OpenSource Geospatial Foundation. OpenLayers consists of pure Javascript libraries that can be called for displaying a map frame containing a variety of geographical data layers including both vector map features and rasters such as imagery and scanned maps. There is great potential for the Digital Nineveh project to take advantage of these new development tools in order to allow different themes for the site visitor and to host a variety media formats as spatially-referenced overlays. Some possibilities include:

- Thematic display: Nineveh area by archaeological time period, Nineveh area by research project sponsor or historic projects organized by decade. Regional scale maps showing sites in the larger region with ties to Nineveh by time period.

- Historical and interpretive map layers: Scanning and overlaying diagrams and sketches from archaeological research/interpretation into the proper geospatial location.

- Multimedia: Providing links to photos of artifacts and features based on their spatial provenience. Spatially referenced links to photos of reconstructed features and virtual reality tours.

- Current Issues: Highlighting currently sensitive areas of the site, looting problems, or planned improvements to Nineveh visitor facilities. Comparing new urban development plans for the Mosul area with archaeologically sensitive areas in the Nineveh vicinity.

- Data and Multimedia: Hosting and facilitating the contribution of spatial data and multimedia information from various users. Ability to restrict distribution of data depending on data licensing and security of archaeological resource due to looting. Geospatial data can be edited using a full GIS suite like ArcGIS or visualization software like GoogleEarth that offers support for multiple OS platforms and is free for non-commerical uses. Data can also be exported to popular GIS formats from the archive for further analysis by researchers. The actual archive will consist of data will be structured in Lat/Long or UTM coordinate system based on WGS1984 datum.

- Metadata and archive structure: Spatial data is referenced to a common geographical reference system and metadata is maintained such that researchers, Mosul residents, tourists, and other stakeholders are able to ascertain the quality of the data, the date and source of the data. Metadata would include:

- spatial source, spatial accuracy, original coordinate system and history of any geographical transformations. Licensing status of data.
- dates and names of research projects, and relevant bibliographical references
- source and quality of other media sources: photos, reconstructions, imagery
- maintained cross-reference lists to different indexing systems in use to track spatial data, media, and artifact collections.

The key aspect of this type of data integration is that spatial relationships form the basis for exploring the site. Users can encounter the rich archaeological datasets and visual media for a particular zone of Nineveh of interest by zooming in and panning around. While a map frame provides the context for exploring the data, much of the supplementary information and media display will appear in other browser windows with links to other media, sortable table views, and back to map view.

إن مشروع الأراشيف الرقمية لنينوى يتألف من عدة تكنولوچيات من أجل توفير و إدارة بيانات المحفوظات و وصول بسيط و آمن و قدرات للتصفح و البحث. هذه الخدمة موجهه النهج توفر البيئة القوية للمستخدمين التى يسهل تشكيلها فى المستقبل. و فى قلب مشروع الأراشيف الرقمية لنينوى يوجد مشروع الميديا ڤولت الذى تم استضافته بواسطة جامعة كاليفورنيا بيركلى و ذلك يؤمن الاستمرار طويل الأجل لمحتوياته.

الأراشيف الرقمية لنينوى مصممة من أجل إمكانية وصول الجمهور المتنوع للمحتوى الغنى داخل الأرشيف أو للمحتوى المقدم من الشركاء الآخرين. الموقع عمدا 'ضحل' ويبتعد عن الروابط العميقة من اجل مساعدة الزوار فى الحصول على المحتوى على وجه السرعة. و كل رابط يمكن الوصول اليه فى ما لا يزيد على ثلاث نقرات.

رأس الصفحة: و تظهر بلغتين و النص العربى هو الغالب فى النسخة العربية للموقع.

منطقة المحتوى الرئيسى و تظهرعلى شكل شاشة عريضة الشكل و ذلك لاستيعاب معظم برامج التصفح و المحتوى يتم تحميله فى هذه المنطقة عندما ينقر المستخدمون على عناصر الموقع و خلفية كل مجال مثل التكنولوجيات والشركاء و الأراشيف وعندها سوف يثبت محتوى النافذة المتحركة.

الازرار باللغتين العربية و الانجليزية ويظهر الفيلم على الصفحة الرئيسية طبيعة الموقع ثنائى اللغة، ويقدم لمحة عامة عن مضمونه.

اخفاء النص لإظهار الخلفية. كل الصور المستخدمة فى الموقع هى لأراشيف نينوى الرقمية و للمهتمين يمكن النقر على مشاهدة صورة الخلفية و التى سوف تخفى النص و توجه المستخدم إلى الصورة فى الأرشيف.

شريط دائم للتنقل. شريط المحتوى على كل صفحة في الموقع ، وتتيح الوصول الى كل المحتوى. و المحتوى تم تنظيمه إلى التسلسل الزمنى ، المواضيع ، الأراشيف ، والخرائط ، والتكنولوجيات وكيفية المساهمة.

التبديل بين اللغتين الإنجليزية و العربية. العشر المجالات الاساسية للموقع تم ترجمتها تماما إلى الإنجليزية و العربية. ولأسباب جمالية و تكنولوجية و لسهولة القراءة فإن الصفحات الأساسية تم تقديمها بالعربية و الإنجليزية. و كلما أمكن فالمحتوى ثنائى اللغة أو يتم عرضها باللغة الأصلية للمقال.

موقع النص فقط. الموقع بأكمله يوجد بشكل النص فقط باللغتين العربية و الإنجليزية. و يمكن ايضا إستخدامه من قبل ذوى الإحتياجات الخاصة سواء بصريا او جسديا.