About the projects

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The Gazetteer began with work done by Dr Hafed Walda, as part of a team at King's College London preparing the online edition of the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (published in 2009). Our idea was simply to provide geographic information for that project; we then began to add material for the preparation of a similar publication, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, of the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (in hand in 2016). In 2013-2015, thanks to a grant from the Leventis Foundation, members of the team worked to create a Heritage Gazetteer for Cyprus, which is now online. We were then enabled by a grant from Global Business Services to take the framework developed for Cyprus, and use it to present the rich data which we had gathered for Libya. To this framework we are now adding heritage data gathered by other members of the Society for Libyan Studies.

The Archives of the Society include manuscripts, documents, photographs and drawings donated by members of the Society who worked in Libya over the last fifty years; while the principal focus is on archaeology, and the recording of material culture, there is also material on the UK’s wider research engagements with Libya and North Africa (including much material from before 1969). The physical archives are held at the University of Leicester, where they have been catalogued by the University Library; a copy of that catalogue forms the basis of the online version, which was made public in 2018. We are now enhancing the data, with further information and by adding digital materials.

The team at King's was led by Professor Charlotte Roueché (Centre for Hellenic Studies:  ORCID 0000-0002-3606-2049), working with Dr Walda, Dr Gabriel Bodard, Dr Stuart Dunn (Department of Digital Humanities), Neil Jakeman (King's Digital Laboratory) and a Libyan Heritage Management Scholar, Valeria Vitale; the site was designed by Ginestra Ferraro (King's Digital Laboratory).