The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) has an over 100-year history, starting with the foundation in 1919 of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ), now the Kenyon Institute, and incorporates the British Institute at Amman of Archaeology and History (BIAAH), now the CBRL Amman Institute, as well as research conducted across all the countries of Bilad al-Sham, the Levant, and Cyprus. Today, CBRL operates as a UK charity to produce and disseminate rigorous and independent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and related fields, and to facilitate UK-Levantine academic collaboration and knowledge exchange.

The CBRL Digital Repository has been established to make accessible initially the archives housed at our three locations: the Kenyon Institute (KI) in East Jerusalem, Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Amman Institute in Amman in Jordan, and our UK archives.

Starting in 2022, CBRL embarked on an ambitious project to make archival materials available via an open-access online repository. This repository aims to digitally re-unify archives which have been divided and dislocated by nation-state borders, funding challenges, and regional upheaval over the past 100 years. The aim of the CBRL Digital Repository is to enable researchers, academics, and the interested public to consult the collections in one place, regardless of location or background. Our aim is to advance knowledge and understanding of the peoples and cultures of the Levant through sharing digital access to these collections.

The CBRL Digital Archive uses an Islandora 8 Open Source System with a Drupal 9 frontend, Qualified Dublin Core & Metadata Object Description Schema standards. Open access repository policies were adapted, and work to apply FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and to use controlled vocabularies (e.g. Getty TGN, LCSH, VIAF, FAST, Pleiades, etc.). The Islandora 8 Open Source System with a Drupal 9 frontend was cloned with permission from the British Institute at Ankara’s digital archive site - (www.biaa.ac.uk/digital-repository/), another British Academy-affiliated British International Research Institute (BIRI).

This repository links data between institutions’ collections, as well as between precursor organisations and current ones, different timeframes and points in history, publications, and archaeological information and research, all using Creative Commons licences, notably CC-BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution and ShareAlike) and CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-Non Commercial). We have been lucky to have guidance and assistance from similar organisations and collections in the creation of our repository - their names are listed below.

External Resources

External links are selected and reviewed when the page is published. However, CBRL is not responsible for the content, accessibility or privacy policies of external websites. Please note that while we provide these links for your convenience, this does not imply affiliation with their content or owners.

If you plan to use any materials from this repository in your own work, be sure to take note of the citation information, including: the title, author or creator, date, and collection it comes from, and please cite the materials as ‘Reproduced with permission from the Council for British Research in the Levant’, or as may be advised for a specific collection. Please contact us if you are unsure about which information to cite.

The Digital Archive is an evolving resource, and we warmly welcome your feedback and suggestions. BSAJ, BIAAH and CBRL sponsored and affiliated researchers who hold materials related to a project that they wish to have archived and digitised are also welcome to approach the archives team. Please email the archivist if you wish to discuss your own collection, and feel free to email with any insights, feedback and questions about the Repository more generally - archives@cbrl.ac.uk